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Transactional Analysis (TA for short) was developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne, who was born

in Montreal, Canada, in 1910. He received his medical degree at McGill University and his psychiatric training at York Psychiatric Clinic. After extensive training at the New York City and San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institutes, his application for membership as a psychoanalyst was rejected. Apparently this spurred him to develop his own understanding of personality, relationships, and therapy.(1) TA did not receive widespread attention until Games People Play was published in 1964. (It sold over three million copies.) Berne lived in Carmel, California, dividing his practice between that city, where he did his writing, and San Francisco, where he also led a TA training group. He was a shy person who kept considerable distance from others, including those who cared about him. He loved and admired the fun-loving Child in other people and always arranged to have a party after training seminars. He died of a coronary in 1970.

In my two brief contacts with Eric Berne, (2) I was struck by the freshness of much that he was saying and the relevance of many of his ideas to my work. In my experience, TA is one of the four most fruitful sources of tools for use in growth-oriented counseling, therapy, and teaching -- the other three being gestalt therapy, psychosynthesis, and feminist therapy. I make use of TA's conceptual tools regularly in teaching and growth groups, in counseling and therapy. TA's

concepts are easily taught. Its language is non-threatening, even playful. Many people can use its concepts and methods as self-help tools. In marriage counseling and enrichment, the relational orientation of TA makes it particularly valuable. The system lends itself to integration with other, complementary approaches such as gestalt therapy.

TA's Understanding of Growth

TA offers an easily understood conceptual picture of the nature and goals of growth. Its theory of growth is based on a tripartite understanding of personality. All persons have three dimensions, or "ego states," in their personalities -- Parent, Adult, Child (PAC). Our Parent ego state consists of the intemalized attitudes, feelings, and behavior patterns of our parents (and other authority figures -- e.g., teachers) as we experienced them in the early years of our lives. The inner Parent has two parts -- the nurturing Parent, which is caring and loving, and the prejudicial Parent, who is full of demands, "oughts," and "shoulds." The Child ego state consists of the feelings, attitudes, and behavior patterns of the little girl or boy we once were. This ego state also has two parts -- the natural Child, who is spontaneous, playful, and creative; and the adapted Child, who is dominated or "spoiled" by the inner Parent. The Parent and Child, though formed in early life, continue to function actively in current behavior and relationships. The Adult ego state is the present-oriented, coping-with-reality part of the personality. Each of the ego states is essential

for a full life. The Child brings creativity, intuition, spontaneity, and enjoyment to one's life. The Parent side enables one to be a good parent to one's children. Because of its accumulated experience, it frees the Adult from having to make innumerable decisions daily (such as looking both ways before crossing a street). The Adult is essential for coping constructively with reality.

A healthy, growing person, in TA's understanding, is one in whom there is "a happy mixture of Parent, Child and Adult with the Adult in the driver's seat."(3) In such persons, the free, effective Adult takes information from the Child, the Parent, and from external reality, and then makes a decision to act in a way that will result in movement toward constructive goals. Persons can function intentionally only to the degree that their Adult is emancipated from control by their Parent and Child sides. The liberated Adult can then choose when it is appropriate to be guided by the inner Parent and when to let the fun-loving, natural Child frolic freely. The ultimate goal of TA therapy is "autonomy," which is manifested in the recovery of three capacities -- awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy. Awareness allows one to enjoy being alive in the present. Spontaneity means freedom to choose and liberation from the compulsion to play manipulative games. Intimacy is the game-free openness of the aware person.

TA is essentially a growth- and hope-centered approach. Based on his therapeutic work in mental hospitals with "regressed" patients who had failed to respond to other therapies, Berne came to a startling conclusion. He became convinced that everyone, even "deteriorated" schizophrenics, has a complete Adult which can be mobilized! The potential for growth is still there, even in persons labeled "hopeless" by conventional psychiatric diagnosis. The crucial issue in therapy is how to activate the long-neglected Adult. As Eric Berne put it, "There is always a radio, the problem is how to get it plugged in."(4) So-called "immature" people are those in whom the Child side takes over inappropriately and unproductively. Berne was keenly aware of what came to be called the "Pygmalion effect" in therapy. He saw the importance of relating to persons in terms of their strengths and potentialities rather than their weaknesses and "pathology": "If a patient is treated as though he had a 'weak ego,' he is likely to respond accordingly. If he is treated as though he had a perfectly good ego which only needs to be activated . . . he will become more rational and objective toward the outside world and toward himself."(5)

Berne's growth orientation was saved from superficial optimism by a realistic view of the power of games and scripts, which make the achievement of game-free spontaneity, awareness, and intimacy exceedingly difficult. "Games" are stereotyped, repetitive, mutually manipulative interactions between two people. Berne wrote, "A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome."(6) Games are also defenses by which we seek to protect ourselves from not-okay feelings. Every game has a pay-off for both persons, but the price is high. Games are the opposite of open, authentic, loving, and growing relationships.

By observing their parents' games, young children learn the one or more games that will dominate interaction among their ego states and in their relationships through their lives. In addition, children adopt an unconscious life plan or "script," which they expect to fulfill. This expectation causes them to behave (without their being aware of it) so as to make their script come true. To the degree that a person's games and scripts are functioning outside their awareness, they are locked into feelings and behavior programmed by their old Parent and Child tapes. Under these circumstances, their feelings of autonomy and freedom are largely illusory.(7) Their growth potentials are frozen.

In spite of this deep programming, the Adult does have the power to change. TA therapy aims at helping people empower their inner Adult to change from programmed responses to more spontaneous, appropriate, and constructive responses in each situation. Berne declared, "While every human being faces the world initially as the captive of his script, the great hope and value of the human race is that the Adult can be dissatisfied with such strivings when they are unworthy." (8) As people become aware of their games and scripts, and the destructive consequences of being under their control, the motivation to change increases. The momentum of change accelerates as they discover that, in fact, they can change, to some degree! Although Berne held considerable hope for fortunate individuals (who have TA therapy) to break out of the trap of their programming, he was pessimistic concerning the possibilities of people generally doing so.

TA concepts are useful growth tools all along the wholeness continuum, from relatively dysfunctional to highly functional persons. When they seem appropriate, I present the basic PAC tool during an early session and then coach clients on how to use it. Some people, of course, do not find the TA approach useful. However, relatively functional people often begin to use TA concepts quickly to understand and mobilize their inner responses and change their relationships. The fact that TA helps some people acquire freeing insights quickly (often within the first session) is one of its assets. With less functional people, a series of sessions of "coaching" in using TA tools is usually required before they begin to have the skill to use them on their own.

Structural Analysis in Growth-oriented Counseling

There are four phases of the process of TA therapy, each representing a significant dimension of personal growth work. The first three are useful in short-term crisis counseling, in growth groups, and in marriage enrichment and counseling. All four phases are useful in longer-term therapy. The first phase, structural analysis, seeks to help people learn to recognize when particular ego states are in the driver's seat of their inner lives. The aim is to free the Adult to guide behavior and to choose when to let the Parent and Child sides be activated.

I usually introduce the PAC approach in counseling or growth group sessions by diagramming it on a sheet of paper and giving an illustration or two of the times I let my own Parent and Child take over unconstructively. I then ask if what I have described throws any light on feelings and problems that we have been discussing. Some clients respond immediately, giving examples of how they let their Child or Parent sides take over. I explain that they may find it helpful in changing the responses they don't like, to practice being aware of when these takeovers occur. By attending to our inner Parent-Child responses we exercise and thus strengthen our Adult. If, during a counseling session or growth group, I sense that a person's Child or Parent is turned on, I may inquire, "Which part of you is in the driver's seat now?" The question often activates the person's Adult awareness, which gives him or her power to choose other responses.(9)

In a key passage Berne declared:

Actionism is an essential feature of structural analysis. The Adult is regarded in much the same light as a muscle which increases its strength with exercise. Once the preliminary phase of decontamination and clarification [of the Adult] are well underway, the patient is expected to practice Adult control. He must learn to keep the Adult running the show for relatively long periods. . . . It is he, and not the Child, who decides more and more effectively when the Child shall take over.(10)

Structural analysis is particularly useful in crisis counseling to help persons interrupt the vicious cycles of panic and paralysis (their frightened Child), which produce inappropriate behavior, which in turn increases the feelings of panic and helplessness. The crisis counselor's task is to make her or his nurturing Parent available to the person by showing genuine caring and warm empathy. This nurturing tends to quiet the frightened Child in the person and to free energy (which was going into the Child ego state) for use by the person's coping Adult. But, all during this nurturing support, the counselor should raise reality questions, which often help to activate the person's Adult. I use four types of questions to help persons mobilize their Adult: What are the important things in this crisis with which you must deal? With which part of your crisis situation will you deal now in order to begin improving things? What concrete plans will you make for this constructive action? What resources within yourself and your relationship (including your spiritual resources), can you use in implementing this action plan? Berne was convinced that feelings will change if behavior changes. As people in crises use their Adult to improve their situation in small but significant ways, their self-confidence, hope, and cope-ability gradually increase.

Structural analysis can be useful to us "workaholics" to help us understand and diminish our addiction to excessive working. The repetitive will-of-the-wisp message from one's demanding Parent to one's adapted Child is clear: "Keep working! Keep achieving! If you ever accomplish enough, I may accept you." Liberation of one's playful Child from the domination of the demanding Parent can occur as one's Adult learns to enjoy this fun-loving, creative, spontaneous part of oneself.

Transactional Analysis in Growth-oriented Counseling

The second phase of TA growth work, transactional analysis, aims at helping persons learn to recognize and control the Parent-Child ego states, which are dominating their transactions with other people. For example, many of the mutually frustrating, circular fights that bring couples to marriage counseling are Parent-Child transactions. To illustrate, a husband, arriving late, responds defensively to his wife's Adult questions about his lateness by coming on with his critical Parent (evident in his accusing, condescending tone of voice and verbal attack): "If you weren't such a nagging bitch, maybe I'd want to get home faster! Did you ever think of that?" Wife (whiny, angry Child voice): "I've got a right to complain when you're so damn selfish and don't care about me!" Such circular P-C arguments produce escalating mutual hurt and distancing, never a resolution of the basic issues between two people. P-C fights can be interrupted only if one party activates her or his Adult and hooks the other's Adult. When such an unproductive argument occurs during a counseling session or marriage group, the counselor may ask, "Are you aware of what's going on between you?" In some cases, this question activates their Adult sides so that they become aware of their futile P-C cycle. Then through Adult-to-Adult negotiations, they may work at resolving their conflicting needs by constructive compromises that enable some of each person's needs to be met.

One of the unique assets of TA is that it provides conceptual tools for discovering the interrelationships between what occurs within an individual and what occurs between that person and others. This linking between intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics makes TA particularly useful in relationship counseling and enrichment work. Back-and-forth movement in counseling, from structural analysis, focusing on interaction among the three ego states within each individual, to transactional analysis, focusing on what is going on between the persons, often illuminates the correlation of these two dimensions of our lives.

In marriage enrichment workshops, it is helpful to teach structural and transactional analysis to couples as a tool for interrupting their own negative spirals of conflict. The exercise at the end of this chapter can be used to teach this experientially, or a couple can be asked to reenact a recent unproductive argument in front of the group. Such a reenactment usually results in a demonstration of Parent-Child interaction. In using this approach, it is essential to debrief the feelings stirred up in the participants thoroughly and then to ask them to suggest and try (in role playing) alternative ways of communicating that will avoid the mutual-frustrating P-C interaction. In this way one coaches couples in Adult-to-Adult communication, thus enabling them to experience effective ways of resolving conflicts.

It is important in work with couples to help them learn to activate their nurturing Parent sides to give each other more positive "strokes," the warm expressions of appreciation and affirmation that all of us need. Negative cycles of mutual deprivation happen less frequently when couples learn to give and receive more affirming strokes and thus to initiate cycles of mutual nurture.

Structural analysis and transactional analysis are useful tools in youth counseling and teen growth groups. The key growth task with which many adolescents struggle is how to keep their Adult in the driver's seat, to avoid slipping back into unproductive behavior domination by their inner Child, and yet to allow their playful Child to enjoy life. Many teen-agers understand TA concepts quickly and enjoy the playful experience of "catching" their own and one another's games. By exercising their Adult sides in this way, they strengthen their ability to keep them in the driver's seat of their lives.

The third phase of the TA process, game analysis, consists of helping persons learn to identify and interrupt the repetitive self-defeating game or games they are programmed to use in relating. It is difficult, but many people can learn to recognize and interrupt old repetitive games. They can learn to avoid having their adapted Child hooked when someone comes on as prejudicial Parent. To the extent that their Adults can interrupt their manipulative games, their potential for authenticity and intimacy will be increased. Most married couples have one or two games which dominate their interaction. Some favorite marital games are: "If It Weren't for You . . ." (the

projection of blame); and "Uproar" (having a fight to avoid anxiety-producing sexual intimacy); "Why Don't You -- Yes But" (futile P-C advice-giving); "I'm Only Trying to Help You" (rationalizing manipulative behavior); "Kick Me" (played by a submissive person); and "Look How Hard I've Tried" (to convince the counselor one is the "helpful" and "righteous," wronged partner). Game analysis helps people discover the payoff of their games, the rewards they must be willing to give up in order to stop the games. The payoffs are often defenses against fears and "not-okay" feelings. In spite of the payoffs, nobody really wins interpersonal games, for the price of playing such a game is to sacrifice an open, loving, intimate relationship. An important reward of interrupting one's marital games is that one can thus avoid teaching them to one's children.

The fourth phase of TA is script analysis. This aims at helping people identify their unconscious life plan, which they expect and are living out. Some people are "programmed" with tragic scripts, which cause them to live as losers with overwhelming feelings of powerlessness and joylessness. An example of a tragic script is that of a woman whose father was an alcoholic. Her unconscious script called for her to keep trying to prove that she could do a better job with an alcoholic than her mother did with her father. Consequently, by the time she came for counseling, she had married and divorced a series of three alcoholics. The goal of script analysis is to help people free themselves from the control of their scripts by becoming aware of them and then mobilizing their Adult to choose a more potentializing life plan.

TA can be a tool in liberating ourselves from the growth-restricting sex-role programming most of us intemalized as small girls and boys in our culture. Hogie Wyckoff observes:

In our culture men are pressured to conform to a script that impoverishes their lives and relationships by preventing the full development of their nurturing Parent and their free playful Child. They are pressured by culturally defined male scripts to always stay Adult -- rational, strong, in control. Typical life-distorting scripts for men include "Big Daddy," "Playboy," and "Jock." Women are impoverished by being culturally scripted to overdevelop their nurturing Parent (and thus to exist for the purpose of taking care of and pleasing "their man" and their children) and to feel powerless because they have not developed their potential Adult competencies. Scripts which trap the potential of many women include "Mother Hubbard" (who takes care of everyone but herself), "Poor Little Me," "Nurse," and "Queen Bee."(12) In their guide to the use of TA by women for self-liberation, Dorothy Jongeward and Dru Scott declare:

When men and women reclaim their full selves by breaking out of their culture's conditioning, they can relate to each other as equals in a satisfing variety of ways: Adult-to-Adult (in solving a reality problem together); playful Child-to-playful Child (in good sex, for example); nurturing Parent-to-Child (as one cares for the other during sickness or a crisis in that person's life); and nurturing Parent-to-nurturing Parent (when they are engaged in mutual affirmation and caring).

As a growth-oriented therapy, TA is essentially a self-help approach. The role of the therapist is that of enabler, teacher, and coach, whose task is helping people's Adults learn to interrupt their own growth-diminishing games and scripts. TA therapists aim at relating to their clients Adult-to-Adult, thus activating or "booking" their Adult. They often tell clients openly what they are doing in therapy and why. TA counselors seek to work themselves out of a job as quickly as possible by teaching clients the basic tools they need to activate their own Adults.

TA offers resources to growth-oriented counselors who are committed to changing the wider systems beyond intimate relationships. A crucial need of our times is to develop institutions that encourage and support Adult behavior. Authority-centered, Big Parent institutions and governments try to keep people's submissive Child sides in control of their inner lives. Such institutions diminish the growth of millions of people.(14)

Churches are particularly prone to being Big Parent institutions. When they are, they stifle the very thing they exist to facilitate -- spiritually centered growth toward wholeness. In Born to Love Muriel James shows how to use TA to enhance the life of a church. She discusses how TA's concepts can be used in discussing theological concepts; in understanding the dynamics of a committee; in holding a staff or a congregational meeting; in choosing music for the choir; in preaching and in teaching as well as in personal growth and counseling groups.

TA Resources for Spiritual Growth

Although Eric Berne had little to say about religion, Thomas Harris, Muriel James, and Tom Oden have applied TA to religious and ethical growth in illuminating ways. Harris observes: "The Parent-Child nature of most western religions is remarkable when one considers that the revolutionary impact of most revered religious leaders was directly the result of their courage to examine Parent institutions and proceed, with the Adult, in search of truth. It takes only one generation . . . for an inference about experience to become a dogma."(15) Clergy persons have often retained control over their people by fostering in them "Not-Okay Child" feelings of fear and guilt, which constrict their spiritual growth. Without a free, energized inner Adult, the prejudicial Parent and the over-needy Child will distort one's beliefs, values, and experiences of God. Parental religion is a projection of infantile wishes onto the way one perceives spiritual reality, thereby blocking authentic spiritual experiencing. TA is a useful tool for helping people "put away childish things" spiritually by de-Parentifying their religious attitudes and beliefs. This process frees them to develop their own Adult beliefs based on their own spiritual searching and discoveries. By letting go of their projection of prejudicial Parent attitudes onto God, they free themselves to experience the nurturing, loving Parent and reality-affirming Adult aspects of God's Spirit.

TA can help facilitate growth in the areas of ethics and values. To the extent that people's behavior is controlled by old programming (P-C games and scripts) no free choices are possible. Therefore, no genuine ethical behavior can occur. In spiritual growth work, people can evaluate their old ethical programming (internalized in their childhood conscience) and claim as their own those values which ring true in their Adult experiences. As long as people are living out of the secondhand values that they internalized from their parents, they will always be ethically ambivalent and self-sabotaging in their behavior. As people develop their own Adult values they can commit their life-styles to them more wholeheartedly.

Muriel James and Louis Savary have added an important dimension to TA in their discussion of the "spiritual self." They see this as the deepest core of our

being, which unites and enlivens the three ego states. They describe religious experience "as awareness of the Power Within penetrating the Inner Core, flowing through the Parent, Adult, and Child, and expressing itself in relation to God.(16) The "Power within us" is the renewing experience of the Spirit of love. When the Power Within flows through one's Child, one's relationships with God and with people become more trusting and loving. When it flows through one's Parent, one is empowered to respond to one's own needs and the needs of others! When it flows through one's Adult, a person will be enlivened in the area of responsible decisions based on accurate perceptions of reality.

TA's Limitations from a Growth Counseling Perspective

From the Growth Counseling perspective, TA has much to offer. It also has some weaknesses and limitations. Because TA is essentially a rational therapy, it requires supplementation by more in-depth, feeling-level methods. Certain gestalt therapy methods, for example, complement TA, by providing effective means of changing growth-blocking Parent and Child tapes. Muriel James' and Dorothy Jongeward's Born to Win and L. Richard Lessor's Love and Marriage and Trading Stamps are books that integrate TA and gestalt approaches.

Another limitation of TA is the oversimplified way in which the PAC ego states are often described. Clinical experience has made it clear to me that there are several different Child sides from different stages of our early lives.(17) There is not just one Parent but several, representing our mothers and fathers and other authority figures as we experienced them at various stages

of our early lives. These inner Parents often are in conflict among themselves. There is also an inner Adolescent, who tends to become activated when we relate to teen-agers.(18) Our Adolescent's inner Parents are different from those of our Child simply because our parents responded differently to us as teen-agers than they did to us as children. The persons we

once were, at each life stage, are still there influencing our present lives. Our inner relationships from the past are much richer and more complex than the simplistic PAC schema suggests. It's important in our growth work for our Adult to get acquainted with all these inner "persons" from our past. Getting to know and like our inner Adolescent, for example, can enable us to relate more constructively to teen-agers.

Tom Oden points out that Eric Berne tends to champion the natural Child and castigate the Parent as the primary culprit in diminishing a full life.(19) There is no doubt that the spontaneity and creativity of many people is diminished by rigid, controlling inner Parent messages. Many of us do need to be liberated from such oppressive Parent influences within ourselves. But many younger people today have not internalized heavy-handed Parent ego states. Their parents were emotionally absent or ethically confused and afraid to set dependable limits. Such people need to re-Parent themselves by developing constructive inner guidelines to enable them to have responsible, mutually caring relation-ships. Because of Berne's valuing of the natural Child, TA has tended toward hyperindividualism that underestimates the need for healthy self-other commitments for covenants of mutual growth. When using TA in growth work it is important to utilize the contributions of people like Muriel James and Tom Oden, who have gone far beyond Berne in emphasizing a sense of interpersonal and societal responsibility as a part of TA.

In Game Free Oden has developed a "theology of interpersonal communion," which increases the usefulness of TA as a spiritual growth resource by strengthening its theological foundation. There is an awareness in Christianity that ultimate Reality itself undergirds and affirms our "Okay-ness." This awareness can help people move from self-rejection to self-acceptance. As Oden puts it: "God lets us know through historical events that we are, despite our sins, okay, affirmed, accepted, embraced with infinitely forgiving love."(20)

Experiencing Your Parent-Adult-Child-Adolescent

The purpose of this exercise is to let you experience several of the many valuable dimensions of your personality. The exercise can be used in a variety of counseling and growth-group situations. (In the instructions that follow, stop at each slash mark, giving yourself time to do what has been suggested. In a growth group, have someone read the instructions, giving ample time at each slash mark to complete the task.)

Find a comfortable place to sit where you won't be disturbed for at least twenty to thirty minutes./ Wiggle and stretch your body, letting it hang loose./ Take several deep breaths, letting any tensions you feel flow out as you exhale. Close your eyes as you do this./ Now, in your mind create a motion picture of the house or apartment where you live now. Make it as vivid as possible, being aware of the colors, sounds, smells, and anything else that's important to you

in your home./ See yourself alone in your house. What are you doing? How do you feel?/ Now bring any other people who live with you into the picture. Be sensitive to changes in your feelings./ Now go back in your memory and create a clear picture of the first house you lived in as a small child, adding colors, sounds, smells, and so on, which are associated with that house in your memory,/ Be yourself as a small child alone in your favorite room of that house./ What

are you doing? How do you feel about living in that house? Try letting yourself be that child for a while./ Bring one of your parents into the room with you./ What is going on between you? How does each of you feel about the other?/ Bring your other parent into the room. What is happening among the three of you?/ What are the feelings of each of you?/ If you lived with only one parent, be aware of how the last instruction made you feel./ Recall a time when your parents punished or criticized you severely. Relive that experience fully in your mind./ Recall a time when your parents behaved affirmingly and lovingly. Relive that experience./ Bring others who lived in that home (siblings, other relatives, pets) into the room, one at a time, being sensitive to what happens between you and in your feelings./ Go out of your home, now. Be aware of how you feel about your relationship in the neighborhood/ at school/ in your church/ with other relatives' Now recall the happiest day of your childhood. Relive that day, savoring the good feelings you still have about it./ Recall the most unhappy day of your childhood -- the time you felt most miserable, hopeless, or rejected. Relive that day, re-experiencing the painful feelings you still have about it./

Be aware of the part of you that has been in your childhood situation and the other part which has been watching from your present adult perspective./ Let this Adult part of you express your warmth, esteem, and caring for your inner Child. Comfort and caress the hurting Child within you./ Say to your Child, "I love you" (using your name)./ How does the Child respond to your love and nurture?/ Now, form a picture of the house or apartment in which you lived as an

adolescent./ See yourself as a teen-ager in that house./ Be that teen-ager for a while. How do you feel about yourself? About life?/ Repeat the experience of bringing your parents and other significant persons into the room, one at a time./ How do your feelings compare with those you experienced in your childhood home?/ Relive an experience of criticism or punishment by your parents when you were an adolescent./ Relive an experience of being praised, loved, appreciated./ Go out of your house now and join your teen-age friends./ What are you doing with them? Have your feelings changed?/ What are your feelings about sex? About masturbation?/ About religion?/ Right and wrong?/ The church?/ Growing up?/ Relive leaving home. Say good-bye to your family. What are your feelings and theirs?/ Be aware of the Adult part of you that has been observing

yourself as a teen-ager. Try to let yourself as an Adult do something to express your love and esteem to the teen-ager within you./ Before opening your eyes, think about how you experienced your inner Child and Teenager./ How do these inner parts of yourself influence your present feelings and relationship?/ When you are ready, open your eyes./ Discuss your learnings with a trusted friend./  

In this exercise, I hope that you got in touch with your inner Child and your inner Adolescent, as well as the Parents you carry within you. Your Adult was the part of you that watched what was happening, from your present perspective. The experience of letting your Adult express warm love and respect to your inner Child and your Teen-ager is a form of "self re-parenting."(21) This is a valuable way to care for yourself, to be a good nurturing Parent to yourself. By using

the strength and warmth of your Adult, you can forgive your parents for their inadequacies (which all parents have) and reprogram your inner Parent to be more caring. (I found it helpful when my parents died to comfort "Junior," the Child within me, by holding and rocking him in my fantasy.)

If this exercise was helpful, I suggest that you use the same approach to revisit other periods of

your life (in childhood, youth, young adulthood, and so on) to do the unfinished growth work from each of those stages. Do this with a trusted friend or in a small growth-support group. If you encountered an accumulation of powerful and painful feelings at any life stage, you may need the help of a skilled therapist to work that through. Working through old, unfinished pain and blocked growth can reduce the power of one's past and release vital energy for living with more creativity and zest in the present!

Further Exploration of Transactional Analysis

Berne, Eric. Games People Play. New York: Grove Press, 1964. A compendium of many types of games; includes an initial chapter summarizing the overall TA system.

---Principles of Group Treatment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Describes how to use TA in growth and therapy groups.

---Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. New York: Grove Press, 1961. The most

comprehensive and technical discussion of TA's principles.

---The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963. TA's approach to group dynamics.

---What Do You Say After You Say Hello? New York: Grove, 1972. A detailed discussion of scripts.

Campos, Leonard, and McCormick, Paul. Introduce Yourself to TA. Stockton: San Joaquin T.A. Institute, 1974. A valuable pamphlet giving a summary and overview of TA in simple language.

Harris, Thomas A. I'm OK -- You're OK. New York: Harper, 1969. A popularization of TA, which includes application of its principles to ethics, religion, and organizations.

James, Muriel, Born to Love: TA in the Church. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1973. A discussion of using TA principles in the church including their relevance to theology.

---et al. Techniques in Transactional Analysis for Psychotherapists and Counselors. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977. Forty-three papers on the philosophy, principles, methods, and applications of TA, and the relation of TA to other therapies.

James, Muriel, and Jongeward, Dorothy. Born to Win: TA with Gestalt Experiments. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1971. An integration of TA framework and gestalt therapy methods.

James, Muriel, and Savary, Louis M. A New Self. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977. A valuable self-help book using TA.

---The Power at the Bottom of the Well: TA and Religious Experience. New York: Harper, 1974. Explores the spiritual self seen as the power and the integrative center of the three ego states.

Jongeward, Dorothy. Everybody Wins: TA Applied to Organizations. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1976. Relates TA to understanding and changing organizations and institutions.

---and Scott, Dru. Women as Winners: TA for Personal Growth. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1971. Uses TA and gestalt methods to help women create a new, positive identity.

Lessor, Richard, and Acton, Clare C. Love, Marriage and Trading Stamps: A TA and Gestalt Approach to Marriage. Chicago: Argus Communications, 1971. TA and gestalt therapy methods for use by couples to improve their marriages.

Oden, Thomas C. Game Free: The Meaning of Intimacy. New York: Harper, 1974. A theological discussion and critique of TA.

Reuter, Alan. Who Says I'm OK? A Christian Use of TA. St. Louis: Concordia, 1974. A theological-biblical discussion and critique of TA.

Steiner, Claude. Games Alcoholics Play: An Analysis of Life Scripts. New York: Grove Press, 1972. A discussion of the dynamics of the games alcoholics and those around them play.

---Scripts People Live. New York: Bantam Books, 1974. A discussion of life scripts and how to change them.

NOTES

1. See Claude Stemet, Scripts People Live (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 10 ff. for further biographical information.

2. I first heard Berne at a one-day workshop in Los Angeles around 1962; in 1964, I took part in a weekend training event in the mountains at Idylwild, California, at which he was the principal resource person.

3. Muriel James and Louis M. Savary, The Power at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Harper, 1974), p. 14.

4. Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 235.

5. Principles of Group Treatment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 221.

6. Games People Play (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 48.

7. Principles of Group Treatment, p. 310.

8. Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, pp. 125-26.

9. For a more detailed account of how to present PAC in counseling sessions, see Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, pp. 130-38.

10. Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, p. 146.

11. "Sex Role Scripting in Men and Women," chap. 13 in Steiner's Scripts People Live.

12. See Scripts People Live, chaps. 14 and 15.

13. Women as Winners (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1971), p. 87.

14. An important TA resource for helping institutions become effective environments of growth is Dorothy Jongeward's Everybody Wins: TA Applied to Organizations (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1976).

15. I'm OK -- You're OK (New York: Harper, 1969), p. 226.

16. The Power at the Bottom of the Well, p. 28.

17. Jacque Schuiff discusses the stages of the development of the Child in her Cathexis Reader (New York: Harper, 1975).

18. After I wrote this, my attention was called to an article by Janis Litke, "The Spindle -- The Teenager in the Adult," Transactional Analysis Journal, vol. 3, no. 4.

19. Game Free: The Meaning of intimacy (New York: Harper, 1974), p. 87.

20. Ibid., p. 85.

21. For additional methods of self re-parenting see Muriel James et al., Techniques in Transactional Analysis (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977), chap. 38.

The behavior-action therapies are a diverse cluster of therapeutic approaches that share the

conviction that all the problems which people bring to therapy are essentially unconstructive behavior resulting from faulty learning. Using many different techniques, these therapies apply the basic principles of learning theory to enable people to unlearn ineffective behavior and learn more constructive behavior in its place. The behavior therapies are also called "action therapies"

because of their emphasis on using direct, action-oriented methods to enable clients to learn new behavior. These therapies contrast with all the "insight therapies" derived from Freud, which regard dynamic inner changes in attitudes, feelings, and self-perception as the primary means of therapeutic change including changes in behavior.

The foundations of behavior therapies were constructed by the Russian physiologist Pavlov's experiments in conditioning animals early in this century.(1) Around 1920 behaviorist psychologist John B, Watson and his students discovered that they could produce phobias in children by simple conditioning procedures and cure those who were already phobic by

counter-conditioning. In the 1930s, psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer developed a classical conditioning method for treating enuresis that proved effective. He used a pad and a bell that rings when the child wets the bed. Around 1950, Joseph Wolpe (then a South African psychiatrist) developed a counter-conditioning method called "systematic desensitivation," which he found eliminated neurotic anxieties in many of his patients in a relatively brief time. He obtained dramatic results in treating phobias and sexual impotence, both of which were considered relatively intractable in psychoanalytic therapies.(2) Around the middle 1950s some of

behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner's students at Harvard began to apply to human beings his methods of instrumental or operant conditioning,(3) developed during a quarter century of laboratory research mainly with animals. Whereas Wolpe has concentrated on extinguishing old unadaptive behavior, these therapies emphasized shaping new constructive behavior through positive reinforcement. By simply rewarding behavior that was constructive and reality-oriented, in mental hospital wards (using a so-called "token economy") they found that they could

increase drastically such "uncrazy" behavior on the part of psychotic patients, many of whom had not responded to traditional therapies.

Since 1960, the floodgates of behavior therapies have opened wide. Learning theory principles

have been applied to many types of problems in living. "Some of the most important applications have been to the training of retarded children, to the elimination of sexual disorders, to the large-scale amelioration of adult psychotic behavior, to the training of autistic children, to the re-education of delinquent adolescents . . . to marriage counseling, to weight control and to

smoking reduction."(4)

The behavior therapies derived from the research of Skinner focus exclusively on changing overt, measurable behavior. In contrast, the cognitive-behavior approaches broaden the focus to also include changing "covert behavior" such as beliefs, expectations, concepts, and feelings. Aaron Beck's

"cognitive therapy"(5) and Albert Ellis' "rational emotive therapy"(6) emphasize the crucial role of thoughts and beliefs in maintaining and changing unadaptive behavior. Albert Bandura's approach employs classical and operant conditioning methods to change behavior but he uses these in a social learning framework that highlights the importance of cognitive processes in facilitating and maintaining desired changes.(7) Unlike Skinner, who sees behavior as entirely the product of conditioning by the external social environment, the cognitive behavior therapists

emphasize the human capacity for self-directed behavior change. They focus on helping people increase self-control and mastery over their own lives. The cognitive behavior therapies provide the most useful growth resources currently available among the behavior therapies.

Learning theory principles probably will be applied to an increasing variety of personal, family, and community problems in the years ahead. Behaviorism is the dominant orientation in most academic departments of psychology. There is therefore an enormous pool of knowledge and

expertise available there for enriching the therapeutic disciplines. It is salutary, indeed, that the findings of the mainstream of empirical research in psychology are now being applied to resolving a host of severe human problems. The application of the general principles of learning to the growth work of functional people is a natural and potentially productive extension of these

behavior-action therapies.

In my experience, many of the working concepts and techniques of behavior-action therapies are effective in helping people change and grow. From a growth perspective, these therapies do not constitute a totally adequate therapeutic approach for everyone. However, they do provide a variety of conceptual and practical tools that can be integrated with resources from other therapies for use in enabling growth. In this chapter, I will highlight some growth resources from the behavior-action therapies which I have found useful. I also will describe some resources from several approaches that, though not usually labeled behavior therapies, all focus primarily on changing overt and/or covert behavior.

Principles and Methods of Behavior Therapies

There are several working assumptions that the diverse behavior therapies hold in common.(8)

In the parentheses following each of these assumptions, I will contrast them with the assumptions of traditional, psychoanalytically oriented therapies:

(1) Behavior therapies regard the painful "symptoms" that bring people for help as the real problem to be treated. (Traditional therapies see symptoms as surface manifestations of deeper, usually hidden causes.) (2) Behavior therapies consider and treat life-and-growth disrupting problems as faulty, maladaptive learning. (Most traditional therapies accept the medical model, which understands mental, emotional, and relational problems as "illnesses" that must be healed.) (3) The primary therapeutic focus of behavior therapies is on changing behavior, overt and/or

covert. The overall aim is to help people unlearn life-destructive behavior and learn life-enhancing skills. Improved behavior generally produces improved feeling. (The focus of traditional therapies is on changing destructive feelings, attitudes, and self-perceptions through insight, which is assumed to produce behavioral changes.) (4) The behavior therapies see the therapist primarily as a teacher of effective behavior. (The traditional therapies view the therapist as a healer or enabler of inner growth.) (5) Behavior therapies are present-oriented. They see the origins of behavior as largely irrelevant to therapeutic change and growth. (Traditional therapies focus on helping people

relive the origins of problems in the past and thereby finishing incomplete growth.) (6) Behavior therapies seek to identify and change the stimuli that trigger problematic behavior and the rewards (positive reinforcements) that cause it to be repeated and earned. (Traditional therapies seek to identify and change hidden "causes" from the past that continue to influence the present from

the unconscious mind.) (7) Most behavior therapies emphasize the importance of having limited, specific, and measurable behavioral change goals so that the effectiveness of therapy can be empirically validated. (Traditional therapies tend to define their goals more globally and subjectively so that empirical measurement of their effectiveness is very difficult if not impossible.) (8) Most behavior therapists regard a therapeutic relationship of warmth and trust as important because it facilitates more rapid learning. Skinnerian-based therapists generally view the therapist-client relationship as of little importance to change in therapy. (Traditional therapies understand the establishment of a therapeutic relationship as essential since the relationship is the primary arena of therapeutic change.) (9) Because the goals are limited and concrete in behavior therapies, and their methods designed to facilitate specific learnings, they tend to be shorter in

duration. (Traditional therapies tend to be longer-term.) (10) Behavior therapies have an aura of hope based on the conviction that what has been learned can be unlearned and the belief that everyone has some capacity to learn new, more constructive behavior. (There is a feeling associated with some traditional therapies that deeply diminished growth can be unblocked only

partially and via a long, expensive process.)

An Illustration of the Behavior Therapy Process

To illuminate the process and some of the methods of cognitive-behavior therapy, here is how Mrs. S., a twenty- nine-year-old, part-time librarian was helped:(9)

When she came for therapy, she described strong feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, and depression accompanied by tension, headaches, and insomnia. Tranquilizers from her physician had not helped. She sought therapy when her husband accused her of being "mentally disturbed" and threatened to divorce her. The therapist spent the first session listening to her pain and thus establishing a trustful, cooperative relationship. Then he began a behavioral assessment of Mrs. S.'s situation, seeking to identify the particular behavioral excesses (e.g., frequent rages) and behavioral deficits (e.g., underassertiveness) that were producing her distress. The therapist asked

her to keep a diary in which she recorded daily events and her reactions to them. This self-monitoring helped both Mrs. S. and the therapist discover the timing and frequency of her distress-causing behavior. After a half-dozen sessions, the assessment pinpointed these behavior difficulties which became the goals of therapy -- her unassertiveness; her inability to express her feelings, which the therapist saw as leading to a build-up of anger, resentment, and guilt (about her anger); the fact that she had never experienced orgasm; and her low opinion of

herself, which was reinforced by the covert behavior of self-deprecating thoughts.

During the process of making the behavioral assessment, the therapist decided tentatively on several therapeutic tools that he could use in helping her change her painful behavior and feelings. Since most of her problems focused on her marriage relationship, Mrs. S. agreed to include her husband in the therapy. The therapist began a program of relaxation training to help her learn

to relax at will whenever she became aware of rising tensions. This gave her a means of reducing her insomnia, headaches, and anxiety. The therapist simultaneously started assertiveness training, coaching her as she rehearsed more assertive ways of responding in situations in which she had been hyper-submissive. The third facet of therapy was a Masters and Johnson type approach to helping the couple deal with her lack of orgasms. With the support and collaboration of her husband, she began to have orgasms after a few weeks. The quality of their relationship was enhanced by this success and by Mrs. S.'s more outgoing behavior. To help her extinguish her self- deprecating thoughts, the therapist encouraged her to list and repeat to herself several true and constructive statements about herself that were incompatible with her unrealistic feelings of worthlessness. After about four months of therapy, Mrs. S. had achieved a dramatic lessening of her depression, self-rejection, and anxiety. Using her new emotional freedom and self-confidence, she decided to return to school to pursue an advanced degree. This account shows how cognitive-

behavioral methods can be used to help persons claim and develop their strengths, enrich their relationships, and expand their vocational horizons.

Behavioral Methods in Marital Counseling

Behavior-action therapies provide a variety of resources for marriage counseling as well as for other relational counseling and therapy. Marital happiness is seen by behavior therapists as

produced by particular need-satisfying behavior. All married couples are both students and teachers of each other. They constantly increase or decrease the probability that need-satisfying behavior will occur in the other. David Knox, a behavior marital therapist, states: "Marital behaviors, like all behaviors, are learned, or rather taught -- according to their consequences. A

reinforcer is a consequence that increases the probability that a specific behavior will recur."(10) Counseling consists of identifying the particular behaviors that are satisfying and those frustrating for a given couple, and then, using learning theory, teaching them to increase the valued behaviors

while decreasing need-depriving behaviors.

I find it useful in marriage counseling and therapy to encourage couples to describe their problems in terms of the specific behaviors that each would like decreased, terminated, modified, increased, or developed. This emphasis establishes concrete goals toward which they need to work to make their marriage more satisfying and pleasurable. Since the goals they set involve specific behaviors, both the couple and the counselor can know when they are making progress in moving toward these goals.

Three behavioral methods are particularly useful in marriage and family counseling. Selective reinforcement consists of helping couples or family members identify the specific responses that reward desired and undesired behaviors and then teaching them to increase the reinforcement of desired behavior and to terminate reinforcement of undesired behavior. It is often very enlightening for couples to discover the ways they are "sinking their own canoe" by unwittingly rewarding the very behavior they find annoying in each other. Nagging, for example, tends

to reinforce negative behavior by rewarding it with attention.

Exchange contracting is another valuable tool in all relationship counseling. After both persons identify the specific behaviors they would like changed, the counselor helps them negotiate a mutually acceptable contract specifying what behaviors each will terminate or increase in exchange for changes in the other. A related behavioral technique called shaping is useful in this do-it-yourselves change process. Shaping consists of breaking down a complex interacting cluster of behaviors (such as a marriage relationship) into small components. By focusing on and reinforcing one or two components at a time, persons in marriage counseling gradually reshape their own relationship. Behavioral methods, like any marriage-counseling tools, can be effective only if both parties value the relationship enough to have some commitment to reconstructing it.

To illustrate how behavioral approaches can be integrated with traditional role-relationship counseling methods, here are the steps that often occur in the process of couple marriage counseling:(11)

Step 1 -- The counselor establishes rapport with both persons by listening with warmth and empathy as they take turns describing the painful problems that brought them for help. The

pattern of their self-other defeating behavior gradually becomes clearer as the counselor listens and asks gently probing questions to clarify how each responds in their negative cycles of interaction.

Step 2 -- The counselor describes briefly how behavioral change methods and exchange contracting may help them decrease their pain and increase their satisfactions. After the anger and hurt have been expressed and thus reduced (which frees the couple to hear and think more

clearly), the counselor may say:

From what you've shared with me, it's clear that each of you is experiencing tremendous pain and not much satisfaction in your relationship. You're caught in a mutual hurting cycle. Each of you, out of your pain, is responding in ways that bring more hurt. An example of how this vicious cycle operates in your relationship is ---. I'd like to encourage you to learn how to interrupt this self-sabotaging cycle and get more satisfactions for both of you back into the way you relate. This would involve working out at each session an agreement about what each of you is willing to do, during the coming week, to make things better for your spouse in exchange for changes on the

other's part to make things better for you.

Step 3 -- If both agree, they are asked to prepare (perhaps as "homework") a list of the specific undesirable behaviors that each would like the other to change, ranking these from the least to the most undesirable.

Step 4 -- Both are also asked to make a list of how they respond to behaviors they find undesirable in each other, to discover how they unwittingly have rewarded such behavior.

Step 5 -- Each then prepares a list of satisfying behaviors he or she would like to have increased or added by the other, rank ordering this list also.

Step 6 -- In light of these lists, the spouses are then coached as they negotiate a simple, workable "exchange contract" in which each agrees to reduce or eliminate some undesirable behavior and replace it with behavior the other desires. To encourage implementation, positive and negative consequences should be specified for each person, in addition to the positive satisfaction of what the other agrees to do -- e.g., a back rub or no back rub; golf or no golf. The counselor serves as communications facilitator and arbitrator, giving them affirmation (positive reinforcement) as they gradually learn the essential skill of negotiating a more fair and workable mutual change contract. The probability of successful implementation of the early change plans is increased if the couple is encouraged to begin with relatively low-priority, low-threat items on both their desired and undesired lists.

Step 7 -- The couple is encouraged to implement their change contract between sessions, expressing approval (positive reinforcement) whenever a desired behavior replaces an undesirable one in the mate's behavior. They are asked to avoid reinforcing undesirable behavior by ignoring it when it occurs. Whatever increase they achieve in reciprocal, satisfying behavior tends to be self-reinforcing. In subsequent weeks, the couple is helped to move to higher (and more difficult)

priority wants and needs in their exchange re-contracting.

Step 8 -- During the process of self-change, the couple is asked to each keep careful records of

their own and the other's success in implementing the agreement. These records are brought to counseling sessions, making it possible for clients and therapist to monitor concrete changes in the behavioral aspect of their relationship.

Couples should be encouraged to "shape" new desired behavior patterns in each other by affirming even very small steps toward those goals -- e.g., "I really appreciate your hanging up your clothes, dear" (ignoring other messy behavior that hasn't changed). Both individuals are encouraged to use "contingency contracts" with themselves and to reward themselves when they

do something that both persons desire -- e.g., I agree with myself to watch my favorite television program only if I have spent -- (amount of time) with the children during the preceding week."

Throughout the change process, the counselor tries to model positive reinforcement by expressing affirmation of each of their small successes in learning new, desired behaviors. The counselor may coach the couple by behavioral rehearsal during the sessions to help them practice the new mutual-fulfilling behaviors (including more effective communication skills) which they will need to implement their exchange contracts and learn better ways of coping with marital conflict and

crises. For example, the counselor may ask: "Will you show me how you plan to communicate so as to prevent the buildup of resentment between you?"

This behavioral exchange process is more complicated in actual practice than it sounds when the steps are summarized. The effectiveness of the techniques can be increased markedly if they are integrated with insights and methods from other therapies. For example, structural analysis from TA can be used to help couples learn to "keep their Adult in the driver's seat" so that they can negotiate and implement a more mutually satisfying marriage contract. (See chap. 6.) Behavior

therapy methods should be used flexibly and in conjunction with methods from traditional therapies that deal directly with change-blocking feelings and attitudes.

Sex Therapy and Enhancement Using Cognitive Behavioral Methods

The newer therapies for sexual dysfunctions and diminution provide a clear illustration of the therapeutic value of learning theory principles. Traditional psychoanalytic therapists view persistent problems of sexual dysfunction as surface symptoms of underlying conflicts and anxieties related to deeply fixated psychosexual development. Understood in this way, the only hope for recovery is long-term analytic therapy. Unfortunately, the general effectiveness of such

therapy in treating sexual problems has not been impressive.(12) In sharp contrast to this approach, the short-term sex therapies pioneered by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, using cognitive-behavioral approaches, often produce impressive therapeutic results. In these therapies, many problems of sexual dysfunction are understood as being rooted not in deep psychosexual pathology but in faulty learning in two areas -- learning sex-negative rather than sex-affirmative feelings and attitudes, and failing to learn the behavioral skills that enable two people to pleasure each other effectively and thus enjoy sex more fully.

Much of the treatment in these approaches is not "therapy" in the traditional sense but simply

attitudinal and behavioral reeducation. In these therapies sex-affirmative attitudes and feelings are gradually developed by a couple as they identify with positive understandings and attitudes of the therapist and as they learn, through coaching and practice, new, non-demand pleasuring skills. Performance and fear-of-failure anxieties, which cause much sexual dysfunction and diminution, are gradually extinguished. This is done by focusing on practicing sensate arousal exercises for their own inherent pleasure, with no intention or need to "succeed" by reaching any goal such as orgasm. Non-demand pleasuring exercises also have proved to be useful for couples who do not suffer major sexual problems but simply wish to develop more of their pleasure potentials.

The effectiveness of behavioral sex therapy techniques is increased when they are integrated with psychodynamic insights and therapeutic methods and with resources from marriage therapy. Helen Singer Kaplan's approach utilizes resources for all three of these therapies.(13) Traditional psychotherapy is used when needed to resolve anxieties and inner conflicts that block change-producing use of the behavioral techniques. Marital therapy is used to resolve interpersonal anger and conflicts that diminish full sexual responsiveness and feed a couple's resistance to doing behavior-changing exercises. It should be noted that often there is positive or negative reciprocity between sex and the other forms of communication in a marriage. As the marriage relationship grows stronger, sex tends to improve, and vice versa. Guided imagery techniques can also be a valuable part of sex therapy with persons who fail to respond to

initial behavior intervention (due to pleasure or failure anxieties) or who fail to reach the level of sexual arousal that they desire.(14) Behavioral sex therapies, supplemented by psychodynamic therapy and marital therapy when needed, have had a dramatically higher rate of effectiveness in

treating sexual dysfunctions than have the traditional therapies.

Growth Resources in Reality Therapy

Reality therapy, developed by psychiatrist William Glasser, is an action-oriented therapy that aims at enabling people to change their behavior so that it will fulfill their basic needs (to give and receive love and to feel worthwhile to themselves and others) in the real world of relationships in ways that do not deprive others of the possibility of fulfilling their needs.(15) (This is what Glasser means by "responsibility.") Although Glasser does not identify his approach with the cognitive behavior therapies, its effectiveness can best be understood in learning theory and

behavioral terms.

Glasser rejects the pathology model of traditional psycho- therapy, believing that labeling people with psychological and relational problems "sick" robs them of responsibility for changing their behavior and gives them an excuse for continuing as they are. He faults traditional therapies

for concentrating on exploring the past and the unconscious, and on attempting to help people change attitudes or achieve insight before they change their destructive behavior. He assumes that people have the ability to change their behavior if they choose. Glasser declares, "Waiting for attitudes to change stalls therapy whereas changing behavior leads quickly to change in attitudes,

which in turn can lead to fulfilling needs and further better behavior."

In reality therapy, the therapist is essentially a teacher of more need-satisfying living who uses a three-step process of growth:

First, there is involvement: the therapist must become so involved with the patient that the patient can begin to face reality and see how his behavior is unrealistic. Second, the therapist must reject the behavior that is unrealistic [irresponsible] but still accept the patient and maintain his involvement with him. Last, . . .the therapist must teach the patient better ways to fulfill his needs within the confines of reality.(16)

The heart of the second step is continuing confrontation with the destructive consequences of behavior. No "reasons" for the client's irresponsible, need-depriving behavior are sought or accepted by the therapist. The therapist actively works to get clients to face the reality they are

avoiding including the self-defeating consequences of their behavior. Questions such as these are asked, "Does what you are doing get you what you really want?" "If not, what will you do differently in order to obtain the consequences you want?" When clients are confronted persistently by a therapist with whom they are involved, they are forced repeatedly to decide whether they will take the responsible path. When they decide that they do not like the negative

consequences of their irresponsible behavior, they become more open to learning responsible behavior, which produces more satisfying consequences.

Reality therapists painstakingly help persons to examine their daily activities and relationships to learn more effective ways of behaving and relating which will satisfy their basic needs. The therapist must be a firm reality-respecting guide and model: "The therapist must be a very responsible person -- tough, interested, human and sensitive. He must be able to fulfill his own needs and must be willing to discuss some of his own struggles, so that the patient can see that

acting responsibly is possible though sometimes difficult."(17) By his attitudes and responses to the client's behavior, the therapist seeks to reinforce reality-based, responsible behavior.

One of the values in Glasser's approach from a holistic growth perspective is his commitment to applying reality therapy's philosophy and principles to institutional-societal systems. His

Schools Without Failure, for example, applies his approach to increasing the capacity of schools to help develop more effective and responsible children and youth.

Reality therapy, as a therapeutic tool, is uncomplicated in its working concepts and effective in

much short-term counseling. It is particularly effective with troubled adolescents and with adults who are acting out their problems in ways destructive to themselves and others; with adults who have a pattern of self-sabotaging, impulsive behavior; with alcoholics; and with persons having

underdeveloped or distorted consciences who need firmer and more constructive inner controls to guide their behavior. Reality therapy provides a simple and useful approach for helping almost anyone who is coping ineffectively with crises. Unless it is supplemented by other therapies, it is not adequate with persons who are suffering from distorted or punitive consciences, from severe

inner conflicts, or meaning- of-life issues that block constructive behavior changes. But in our society, where so many people act out their hunger for love, esteem, and meaning in destructive, irresponsible ways, Glasser's therapy is a valuable growth resource.

Growth Resources from Crisis Counseling

Crisis intervention methods, as these have developed over the last four decades, offer resources to help oneself and others cope with both developmental and accidental crises growthfully. Research pioneered by Erich Lindemann and Gerald Caplan at Harvard increased the understanding of how people cope with a wide variety of losses and crises. These research findings have provided a solid conceptual foundation for the development of crisis intervention techniques (which have many affinities with reality therapy and the approach of the ego analysts). Let me summarize the working principles of crisis intervention theory.(18) To "get inside" these principles experientially, I recommend that you apply them to a current or recent crisis in your own life:

(1) Crises happen in rather than to us. The heart of a crisis is our response to a situation that we experience as stressful or emotionally hazardous. Since a crisis is essentially an inner experience, we have the potential of choosing to respond in ways that mobilize our coping resources. (2) The life situations in which we are vulnerable to inner crises are those in which we experience a loss or the threat of a loss of something important in our lives. A cluster of painful feelings -- e.g., grief,

anxiety, confusion, powerlessness, depression, anger, disorientation, inner paralysis -- constitute the essence of the crisis experience. These feelings result from the ineffectiveness of our old coping skills to meet the psychological needs that are present after the loss. (3) Stresses, changes, losses, and crises occurring in a short time span are cumulative. As Thomas Holmes's research

demonstrates, experiencing a series of major changes in a short period of time makes people vulnerable to developing psychological, psychosomatic, or relationship problems.(19) This fact underlines the crucial importance of providing support and caring to persons going through multiple changes and losses. (4) Crises are forks in our growth road. If we learn to cope constructively with a heavy crisis or series of crises, we will develop new personality skills for

handling future crises. The human personality is like a muscle. If we use it to cope with difficulties, it grows stronger. If we avoid using it, by various escape mechanisms, it grows weaker. (5) Most of us have a variety of hidden resources that we can mobilize for handling crises. We usually don't discover these inner strengths until stressful circumstances force us to do so. This is why crises are potential growth opportunities, (6) The goals of crisis counseling are to help people do their "grief work" (expressing, working through, and resolving the painful feelings), mobilize their coping potentialities, including learning new coping skills, and thus to grow stronger. (7) Discovering the origins of inadequate responses to crises is usually

unnecessary to improve coping. As William Menninger put it, "You don't need to know how a fire started to put it out." The focus of crisis counseling, as of behavioral therapies generally, is learning to act more effectively in the present. (8) Experiencing the energy of hope for change when we are traumatized by crises, provides the power that is essential for mobilizing our inner

resources. Hope often is the important variable in determining how we cope in difficult life situations. The counselor's function as hope-awakener is therefore crucial in crisis intervention work.(20) Realistic hope is awakened by a variety of means. It is "caught" from the counselor's

warm support and affirmation of the person's potential capacities for coping. It grows stronger as the person gradually learns to take constructive action. (9) A key resource for coping with our

crises is the strength and quality of our interpersonal support system. Crisis counseling seeks to help people turn to others who care about them, believe in them, and are honest with them. (10) Handling heavy stresses, losses, and handicaps constructively tends to give one instant rapport with other people confronting similar crises. In crisis work it is important to encourage people

to reach out with an "insider's" understanding and caring to others in similar deep water. The experience of mutual growthing, which is part of the power of self-help groups like AA, illustrates a dynamic that can be used productively in much crisis counseling.

It is possible for us human beings to transform many of the minuses in our lives into at least partial pluses! It is an expression of the wonder of being human when people take miserable circumstances and discover unexpected possibilities for some good, even some growth in them! Asking people, after they have coped with a heavy crisis, questions like these -- "What have you learned from this painful situation?" or "Has anything positive come out of this miserable situation you've been in?" -- helps awaken awareness of ways they have grown, as a result of struggling to handle the crisis.

Growth Resources in Rational-Emotive Therapy

Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) is a cognitive therapy (rather than a behavior therapy) created by psychologist Albert Ellis. It complements behavior therapies by focusing on the cognitive

determinants of ineffective behavior. According to Ellis, the well-being and growth of persons are determined by how they use four essential and interdependent human processes -- perceiving, feeling, acting, and thinking. Disturbances in our feelings, perceptions, and action arise, to a considerable degree, from irrational and invalid thoughts and beliefs such as these:(21)

--I must be perfectly adequate, competent, and achieving before I can think of myself as being worthwhile.

--I must be approved or loved by almost everyone I know for virtually everything I do.

--When I am very frustrated, treated unfairly, or rejected, I must view myself and things in

general as awful and catastrophic.

--My emotional misery is derived from external pressures, and I therefore have little ability to control or change my feelings.

--I must preoccupy myself and keep myself anxious about things that seem dangerous or fearsome.

--I must blame myself (and others) severely when I (or they) make serious mistakes or do something wrong.

--It is catastrophic if I cannot find perfect solutions to the grim realities in my life.

--It is easier to avoid facing difficulties than to take self-responsibility and develop more rewarding self-discipline.

--All the beliefs held by respected persons or by our society are accurate and should not be questioned.

The process by which we disturb ourselves has three stages according to RET: A. Activating event -- Someone criticizes us harshly and unfairly. B. Belief system -- Our perception of this

event is colored by the irrational belief that one's worth is dependent on others' approval. C. Consequent emotion -- As a result, we feel depressed, worthless, and as though a major catastrophe has occurred.

The process of correcting these feelings has two steps: D. Disputing the irrational belief -- This

involves learning to identify the irrational thoughts or beliefs that we are saying to ourselves and then correcting these self-damaging inner statements. E. Event is transformed -- The activating event is reevaluated in light of a rational and valid idea -- "I don't have to be approved by everyone in order to have a sense of my basic worth." Constructive feelings and behavior flow from the rational belief.

RET therapists actively challenge their clients' irrational ideas, expectations, and beliefs. They teach their clients to do the same and then to substitute rational, self-accepting ideas for dealing with the inevitable frustrations, which occur in everyone's life in this very imperfect world. Ellis describes how he works with a client: "I try many maneuvers to try to achieve a consistent goal:

to see how quickly I can get him to . . . understand exactly what he is doing to make this thing bothersome, and to discover what he can do to stop bothering himself."(22)

The basic theory of RET is useful in helping people identify and interrupt the disruptive belief-feeling-behavior cycles in which they are caught. Most psychotherapies deemphasize the role of concepts and beliefs in producing emotional distress and distorted behavior. In contrast, this therapy (and others like it) recognizes the critical influence of the cognitive dimension in both our problems and our growth.

The cognitive therapies provide valuable resources for those of us who are concerned with correcting growth-diminishing religious beliefs. The rigid theology of many individuals and

families both reflects and reinforces the rigid values and life-style by which they constrict their growth and freedom. Head-on attacks on their defensive, security-giving belief systems (as in the RET's approach) often are ineffective in helping them change to more growthful beliefs. But it is important for pastoral counselors and other therapists to be aware of the ways in which their

beliefs feed and exacerbate their negative feelings and behavior. The therapist's gentle but direct efforts to enable them to reevaluate and revise their pathogenic beliefs may help them gradually relax their defensive hold on growth-constricting beliefs. Such "theotherapy" usually takes considerable time, but it can be crucial in liberating the potentials of individuals and family

systems to grow spiritually and otherwise.(23)

Some Limitations of Behavior Therapies

The behavior therapies have both strengths and weaknesses when viewed from a whole-person, growth perspective. There is validity in their view that all persons function (to at least some degree) like computers programmed by past experience. (In persons whose growth is severely

blocked, e.g., psychotics, the automaton-like aspects of their personalities dominate much of their behavior.) As behavior therapists claim, the principles of learning on which their therapies are explicitly based also describe the ways in which the change produced by other therapies takes place. Certainly the techniques for self-reprogramming of faulty learning -- e.g., those developed by the sex therapies -- can be valuable to persons all along the mental health continuum.

But the underlying philosophy of personality in classical behaviorism is partial and therefore, by itself, an incomplete understanding of human beings. Radical behaviorists like B. F. Skinner understand all human behavior reductionistically, as controlled entirely by the external environment. Skinner declares: "As we learn more about the effects of the environment we have less reason to attribute any part of human behavior to an autonomous controlling agent."(24) Such a view ignores the fact that there is a self-determining, inner dimension to persons, a dimension that is most evident in relatively whole or "healthy" persons. This view eliminates human freedom, choice, and intentionality. By attending only to external, observable behavior, the radical behaviorists make therapeutic change measurable, but they achieve this by ignoring all the rich, inner choiceful dimensions, all the complexity and mystery of human beings. Such a view also ignores the dimension of Spirit, the transcendent Self.

Fortunately, most behavior therapists do not operate out of a rigid S-R (stimulus-response) Skinnerian model of personality. Rather they work from an S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) model, which recognizes that most people have some ability to choose among their options. The cognitive-behavior therapists have corrected the Skinnerian view of persons to a considerable

degree by focusing on changing inner, covert behavior such as beliefs and feelings as well as overt behavior.

The analytic emphasis on the deeper dynamics of human behavior and the behaviorist emphasis on regarding behavioral "symptoms" as real problems both have therapeutic validity. As the behavioral therapies hold, many maladaptive learned behaviors do require therapeutic attention. Alcoholism is a vivid example of a "runaway symptom." The excessive drinking, which leads eventually to alcoholism, initially may have been motivated by anxiety and conflicts from

deeper levels of the personality. But the use of alcohol as a self-prescribed pain-deadener creates a runaway symptom of increasing drinking in a vain attempt to overcome the psychological and physiological pain resulting from previous excessive drinking. What began as a surface symptom becomes a problem demanding treatment in itself. As AA has shown, unless the vicious cycle of this addictive process can be interrupted (by avoiding the first drink), sobriety will not be

achieved and any underlying psychological problems will remain inaccessible to therapy. But some alcoholics feel worse, not better, when they stop drinking. Their intrapsychic sources of conflict, guilt, and anxiety must be treated by psychotherapy if their sobriety is to be permanent. This same principle applies to many non-alcoholics. It is possible to change some destructive feelings by

learning to behave more constructively. But some hidden, conflictual feelings must be resolved therapeutically if behavioral changes are to be permanent. A whole-person approach focuses simultaneously in therapy on changing both overt behavior and underlying feelings, values, attitudes, concepts, and beliefs (covert behavior). This often involves the use of behavioral methods in conjunction with complementary methods from depth therapists.

Psychologist Perry London, who has contributed to the development of the behavior-action therapies, observes:

Not all the problems that people bring to psychotherapy can be, with equal ease, identified as limited problems of function, and even when they can, it is not always possible to restore functioning without radical changes in the patient's system of meaning. Phobias are good examples of clear-cut symptoms where function is lost and may be directly restored, and we may likewise grant that many other psychic problems rest in learned anxieties. . . . But one cannot

speak so glibly of dysfunction of husbands who are unhappy with their wives and seek counsel, or of young people who, fearing an insecure and shadowed future, fear to cast themselves into it in love and work , . . , or the aging whose fear of what is ahead co-mingles with regret at what is left behind, and seek both solace and repair.(25)

In the contemporary world it is impossible to ignore the epidemic of meaninglessness, which produces many of the psychological, psychosomatic, behavioral, and relational problems of those who come seeking help. Behavioral methods are most effective with clear behavioral dysfunction. They become progressively less helpful for problems in which meaning-emptiness plays a larger and larger role.

Behavior therapies have been labeled by some of their critics in the humanist tradition as forms of "mind manipulation" and even "therapeutic brainwashing." There is evidence that learning theory techniques have been misused in manipulative ways in some institutional settings without

the informed consent of those being changed. It is probably true that behavioral approaches lend themselves to this type of manipulative, covert misuse. But it is invalid to dismiss all the helpful behavioral approaches because they are vulnerable to misuse. As in all sound therapy, persons who come for help should be free to choose the goals of change. The choice ordinarily is made in

collaboration with the therapist, but the directions of change desired by the persons receiving therapy usually should be ultimately respected. Behavioral methods should be used openly and their probable effects explained to the clients. With persons not able to make the decision for themselves -- e.g., very small children and mentally ill persons who are out of touch with reality -- it may be necessary for others to choose the directions of change without their consent. But such exceptions to the basic principle of self-determination should be made with great caution, using built-in safeguards, and only with persons who are really incapable of choosing. The ultimate goal of the behavioral methods, when they are used growthfully, is to teach troubled persons self-help tools for enabling them to increase their own self-determination and effectiveness in living. This is the way in which many of the cognitive behavior therapies are now being used.

It is important to use behavior therapies in the context of systems-oriented approaches (described in chapters 9 and 10). Otherwise behavior therapies, like any individualistic approaches, can be misused to adjust people to pathogenic relationships, institutions, or cultures. To do this is to inhibit, in the long run, full human growth.

Finally, it is important to use behavioral methods with a light touch and a nonmechanistic style. This anecdote illustrates the importance of this approach:

A famous rat psychologist has been trying for years to conduct experiments which would show him how to raise the 1. Q. of rats. . . . [He] persevered and set up laboratory situation after laboratory situation and educational environment after educational environment and the rats never

seemed to get any smarter. Finally, quite recently, he issued a statement that the only thing he could discover in ten years which made rats any smarter was to allow them to roam at random in a spacious and variegated environment.(26)

What is true of rats seems to be even more true of human beings!

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in Behavior-Action Therapies

Beck, Aaron T. Cognitive Therapy and Emotional Disorders. New York: International Universities Press, 1976. Integrates cognitive and behavior approaches.

Clinebell, Howard. Growth Counseling: Coping Constructively with Crises. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974. A series of eight crisis-counseling training courses on cassettes with a users' guide.

Dustin, Richard, and George, Rickey. Action Counseling for Behavior Change. Cranston, R.I.: Carroll Press, 1977, Discusses learning theory, action counseling techniques with individuals and groups.

Ellis. Albert, and Harper, Robert A. A Guide to Rational Living. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1961. Applies the rational-emotive therapy approach to problems in living.

Foreyt, John P., and Rathjen, Dianna P., eds. Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Research and

Application. New York: Plenum Press, 1978. A collection of papers on the use of cognitive behavior methods with a variety of types of problems.

Glasser, William. Reality Therapy: A New Approach to Psychiatry. New York: Harper, 1965.

An introduction to the theory and practice of reality therapy.

--Schools Without Failure. New York: Harper, 1969. Applies reality therapy principles to

improving education.

Kaplan, Helen Singer. The Illustrated Manual of Sex Therapy. New York: The New York Times Book Co., 1975. A manual on sex therapy illustrated with drawings of couples.

--The New Sex Therapy: Active Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1974. A book on the theory and practice of Kaplan's sex therapy, integrating methods from learning theory, dynamic psychotherapy, and marital therapy.

Knox, David. Dr. Knox's Marital Exercise Book. New York: David McKay, 1975. A do-it-yourself guide for couples using behavior methods to resolve problems in such areas as communication, sex, alcohol, friends, parents, children, and money.

--Marriage Happiness, A Behavioral Approach to Counseling. Champaign, III.: Research Press, 1971. A valuable application of behavioral techniques to marriage counseling and therapy.

Levis, Donald J., ed. Learning Approaches to Therapeutic Behavior Change. Chicago: Aldine, 1970. A series of papers exploring the history, principles, and theory of behavioral therapy.

London, Perry. The Modes and Morals of Psychotherapy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. Contrasts insight and action types of therapy, and describes the approaches of some of the major behavioral therapies.

Mash, Eric J.; Handy, Lee C.; and Hamerlynck, Leo A. Behavior Modification Approaches to Parenting. New York: Brunner/ Mazel, 1976. The uses of behavioral methods in training parents.

Stone, Howard. Crisis Counseling. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976. A succinct introduction to

crisis intervention methods.

--Using Behavioral Methods in Pastoral Counseling. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979. A practical guide to the use of behavioral approaches.

Stuart, Richard B., and Davis, Barbara. Slim Chance in a Fat World Champaign, III.: Research Press, 1972. A behavioral approach to overcoming obesity.

Switzer, David K. The Minister as Crisis Counselor. Nashville Abingdon Press, 1974. Describes crisis intervention theory and it use by pastoral counselors, with chapters on grief, family crises, and divorce.

Wolpe, Joseph; Salter, Andrew; and Reyna, L. J. The Conditioning Therapies. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. Describe the challenge of various conditioning therapies to psychoanalysis.

Yates, Aubrey J. Behavior Therapy. New York: Wiley, 1970 Describes the application of behavioral methods to a wide variety o human problems.

NOTES

1. The main points of this historical sketch are paraphrased from a brochure announcing the First Annual Southern California Conference on Behavior Modification, October, 1969.

2. See Joseph Wolpe, Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958).

3. Operant conditioning uses rewards to reinforce the learning of desired behavior and withholding of rewards or punishment to eliminate destructive behavior. Operant conditioning is

the type used in most behavior therapies.

4. From the brochure described in note 1.

5. See Beck's Cognitive Therapy and Emotional Disorders (New York:

International Universities Press, 1976).

6. See Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper. A Guide lo Rational Living (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), and Ellis, et al.. Growth Through Reason (Palo Alto, Calif.: Science and

Behavior Books, 1971).

7. See Bandura, Principles of Behavior Modification (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969).

8. These principles are paraphrased from a list of principles developed by H. J. Ehsemch in 1958. See Donald J. Levis, ed.. Learning Approaches to Therapeutic Behavior Change (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), pp. 12-13.

9. This case was described by G. Terence Wilson and Gerald C. Davison in "Behavior Therapy, A Road to Self-Control," Psychology Today, October, 1975, pp. 54-60.

10. Dr. Knox's Marital Exercise Book (New York: David McKay, 1975), p. 28.

11. These steps are adapted from "Behavioral Approaches to Marital Therapy," by Robert Liberman in Couples in Conflict, eds. Alan S. Gurman and David G. Rice (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975), pp. 207-78.

12. See Jeffrey C. Steger, "Cognitive Behavioral Strategies in the Treatment of Sexual Problems,"

in John P. Foreyt and Dianna P. Rahtjen, eds., Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Research and Application (New York: Plenum Press, 1978), pp. 83-84.

13. See

Kaplan, The New Sex Therapy (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1974), and The Illustrated

Manual of Sex Therapy (New York: The New York Times Book Co., 1975).

14. See Steger, "Cognitive Behavioral Strategies," pp. 91-92.

15. Reality Therapy (New York: Harper, 1965), p. 15.

16. Ibid., p. 25.

17. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

18. Crisis theory and methods are discussed in more detail in my book Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, chaps. 8 and 9.

19. For a description of Holmes's stress score, see my book Growth Counseling for Marriage Enrichment (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), pp. 64-65.

20. For a discussion of the power of hope in therapy, see Growth Counseling, pp. 48-49.

21. These irrational ideas are paraphrased from Ellis and Harper, A Guide to Rational Living, pp. 185-87.

22. Growth Through Reason, p. 3.

23. For methods of facilitating spiritual growth, see Growth Counseling, chap. 4.

24. Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 96 and 102,

25. The Modes and Morals of Psychotherapy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), pp. 121-22.

26. J. Hearndon, How to Survive in Your Native Land (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 116.

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil on Lake Constance in Switzerland in 1875. His father was a clergyman. Carl was very precocious, reading Latin books at age six. To escape his loneliness and the marital conflicts of his parents, he often played for hours alone in the attic with a wooden figure he had carved for himself. Feeling isolated from the external world, he turned to the inner world of his own dreams, fantasies, and thoughts.(1) When he entered the University of Basel he chose to study medicine and later psychiatry because those disciplines seemed to combine both of his major interests --- science and the humanities.

At twenty-five Jung became an intern at one of the most progressive psychiatric centers in Europe,the Burgho1zli Mental Hospital in Zurich. From then on, Zurich was his home. By age thirty, he was chief of the clinic and a lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zurich. He wrote a book reporting his research on schizophrenia, developed the word-association test, and introduced the terms "intravert" and "extravert." Jung married Emma Rauchenbach. They had five children. His wife trained as a psychologist and lectured at the Jung Institute, which was established in 1948.

When Jung became convinced of the validity of many of Freud's ideas, he wrote to him, sending a copy of his book on schizophrenia. Freud invited him to Vienna. When they first met, the two men talked almost non-stop for thirteen hours. A close friendship developed between them. For a time. Freud considered Jung his logical successor. But Jung could not accept Freud's reductionism and his insistance that the roots of all psychopathology are sexual. Freud was troubled by Jung's interest in and views on religion. The break between them finally came when Jung published a book in 1912 developing the view that libido is basically generalized life energy rather than always being sexual. The rupture of their relationship was painful to both men. Jung experienced three years of depression during which he felt that he was going insane. On the surface he was a respected psychiatrist with a thriving private practice, a university lectureship, and a large family. But underneath, Jung felt he was losing contact with reality and that life had lost all meaning. He wrote little and resigned his lectureship because he felt he could not teach. His efforts to treat his problem by attempting to understand it intellectually were to no avail. In desperation, he decided to surrender to the impulses of his unconscious. These led him to build a model village out of small rocks, reliving a time in his childhood when he loved to "play with blocks.

This play therapy was the turning point of his crisis. He discovered that "the small boy is still around."(2) Playing with the village of stones opened him to a prolonged exploration into his unconscious during the next two years, following his inner images. fantasies, and dreams. What he discovered in his unconscious was like "a stream of lava. and he heat of its fires reshaped his life."(3) From this traumatic mid-years crisis Jung developed a new center and meaning for his life, and a new understanding of personality which he called "analytic psychology." He came to focus increasingly on the resources of the unconscious as revealed in myths, symbols, art, folk tales, dreams, and fantasies. He traveled to Africa and India to study non-Western folklore and symbols. He also came to New Mexico to study the symbols and myths of the Pueblo Indians.

During his recovery from a near-fatal heart attack at sixty-nine. Jung had a series of visions. These precipitated a highly productive period during which he wrote some of his most original and creative books. Of this experience of illumination he later wrote: "I might formulate it as an affirmation of things as they are: an unconditional 'yes' to that which is, without subjective protests -- acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see them and understand them, acceptance of my own nature, as I happen to be."(4) After a remarkably productive lifetime of research, writing, and psychotherapeutic practice, Jung died in 1961 at the age of eighty-six. Some of Jung's insights anticipated similar thrusts in therapies such as gestalt and psychosynthesis. The resources I will now highlight are those which I have found useful in facilitating growth work.

Jung insisted (as did Rank that creativity is at the center of every person's potential. But he was keenly aware of the ways it is wasted in most people: "The art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all arts. . . . For so many people all too much unlived life remains over . . . and so they approach the threshold of old age with unsatisfied claims which inevitably turn their glances backward."(5) Jung's essential growth-centeredness comes through clearly in this criticism of Freud's pathology-orientation: "I prefer to look at man [sic] in the light of what in him is healthy and sound, and to free the sick man from that point of view which colors every page Freud has written. Freud's teaching is definitely one-sided in that it generalizes from facts that are relevant only to neurotic states of mind; its validity is really confined to those states. . . Freud's is not a psychology of the healthy mind."(6) He saw psychopathology as rooted in undeveloped resources in persons: "Hidden in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is condemned to resignation, bitterness, and everything else that is hostile to life. A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water."(7) He saw that there is a natural process and drive toward wholeness in all persons, on which therapy must depend: "The driving force . . . seems to be in essence only an urge toward self-realization."(8) Therapy is simply a way of facilitating and accelerating this natural developmental process. Jung called the process of moving toward wholeness "individuation." He wrote: "Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being and, in so far as 'individuality' embraces our innermost . . . and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one's own self. We could therefore translate individuation as 'coming to selfhood' or 'self realization.'"(9)

Jung distinguishes between the ego -- the center of consciousness -- and the self, which potentially is the integrating center of the whole personality. The process of wholeness involves the harmonious integration of all aspects of the personality, and the movement of one's center from the conscious ego to the self, which integrates both the conscious and the unconscious personality resources. Wholeness involves the union of opposites. Whole persons have their four psychic functions -- thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition -- in balance and available for use when appropriate, even though one function is usually dominant.

Although each person's individuation journey is unique, there are four general dimensions of the process. The first is the unveiling of the persona, the mask of social roles by which we relate and express ourselves to the world. The. persona has both constructive and destructive possibilities. Those who are overidentified with their social roles and overinvested in the impression they are making on the outside world need therapeutic assistance to reduce the rigidity and weight of their persona so that it will not exhaust their creative energy. Yet, a healthy persona is necessary to protect us from the full impact of social attitudes and forces.

The second stage of individuation involves confronting our shadow, the rejected aspects of our personalities which we consider inferior and in conflict with our persona, standards, and ideals, and therefore have repressed into our personal unconscious. Jung held that repressed memories and desires become organized around the shadow, forming a hidden, negative self, which is the shadow of our ego. As long as the shadow is repressed and unrecognized it tends to be projected onto others (as in scapegoating) and to dominate us without our being aware of it. Although in dreams the shadow often appears as a dark, primitive, or repellent figure, it is a potential source of spontaneity, instinctual energy, and creativity. As the shadow becomes conscious in therapy, the rejected parts of ourselves are reclaimed, causing it to lose much of its dangerous quality and its ability to dominate the inner life.

The third growth stage of individuation is to confront one's "soul image," the anima or the animus. Jung held that in the unconscious of women there is an animus and in a man an anima.

These are contrasexual psychic structures around which focus all those tendencies and experiences that do not fit one's self-definition as a woman or a man. This part of the unconscious appears in dreams as a person of the other sex. As long as this structure is unconscious, persons tend to project it onto persons of the other sex, and to love it or reject it there. In marriage counseling it is often helpful if couples can develop some awareness of how much of their unproductive conflict results from their projection of unaccepted aspects of themselves onto the other person, where these attributes are related to with deep ambivalence. For example, a "macho" man and very "feminine" woman each fears, represses, and projects onto the other those feelings and tendencies in themselves that don't fit the rigid sex-role stereotypes of their culture. If the man can reclaim his rejected anima and the woman her animus, they will be more whole, androgynous people. If such a man can reclaim his soft, vulnerable, feelingful side, and the woman her rational, assertive, analytic side, they will no longer need to either worship or fight these sides of themselves in each other.

The fourth stage of individuation involves developing one's true self as the integrating nucleus of the whole personality, conscious and unconscious. In the self, the opposites can be reconciled in complementary union. The ego is still the center of consciousness, but the self becomes the center of the whole personality. The self is the divine spark, the image of God within each person.

Jung wrote: "I thank God every day that I have been permitted to experience the imago Dei in me."(10)The self is often symbolized in dreams as a mandala, a circle, or by some symbol of divinity. Jung's concept of the self is very similar to Assagioli's "higher Self," and to the idea of the soul in the Christian tradition. Each refers to the same vital truth -- that there is a dimension of transcendence in us human beings and that we are whole only when this dimension becomes the center of our personhood.

Jung believed that the unconscious (which is 90 percent of the psyche) provides the major resources necessary for moving toward wholeness. The unconscious expresses itself mainly in symbols. In contrast to Freud's view, he understood the unconscious as "a great repository of creativeness"which can be used for good or for ill. Prior to the process of individuation, the shadow, the anima, and the self are all unconscious. As they are brought into consciousness, as one's self-awareness grows, they enrich that dimension of personality tremendously.

The deepest level of personality, the collective unconscious represents our psychological heritage from the long story of evolution, it is also our connection with all that now is. The archetypal images of the collective unconscious can be understood as universal symbols of our common human experiences. They appear in many parts of the world in folk tales, legends, and myths, as well as in the dreams and fantasies of individuals.

Even if one does not take all Jung's views about the collective unconscious literally, it seems evident that there is within us a deep level where we are not alone but instead are somehow related to the whole of human kind, history, and nature. The imperfect but meaningful image that expresses a part of what I understand Jung to mean by the collective unconscious is that of a fruit orchard. Each tree has its individual life, unique identity, and space. Yet all the trees are grounded in the same soil, experience the flow of common streams of water and nutrients through the soil, and interact with the same energizing air and sunlight. Each tree interacts with the environment in unique ways that express its own nature and potential -- e.g., apple trees produce apples, plum trees produce plums. So it is with us human beings. Each of us is unique and autonomous; yet at the deepest level of our beings, we all are interrelated in a great interdependent network of living things within which we are called to live with sensitivity and caring. Opening ourselves to this transpersonal dimension of ourselves can enhance the sense of meaningful relatedness to the whole ecosystem. This can provide the basis for the ecological consciousness and caring on which our collective survival or spaceship earth may well depend.

Dreams, as the major form of communication from the unconscious, play a decisive role in Jungian as they do in Freudian therapy. But Jung understood dreams very differently from Freud. He saw them as messages from the unconscious, luring us toward greater wholeness. Learning to understand the messages of one's dreams by "befriending"(11) them (rather than analyzing them) is vitally important in removing the blocks and claiming the resources of growth in the unconscious. Frightening dreams reveal those aspects of ourselves which we have rejected and which return as self-created "demons" to stymie our potentializing. When these aspects of ourselves are befriended and reintegrated, they become resources rather than blocks to our growth. The unconscious is the source from which religious experience flows. This conception led one Jungian pastoral counselor, John A. Sanford, to speak of dreams as "God's forgotten language." This view is very similar to the understanding of dreams in the Bible.

There is in Jung a sense of the relational nature of wholeness that has deep affinities with the interpersonalism of Martin Buber. Jung wrote:

The living mystery of life is always hidden between Two, and it is the true mystery which cannot be betrayed by words and depleted by arguments.(13)

Jung was much more hopeful and optimisitic than Freud about human beings and their potentializing. Yet, he had a keen awareness of the powerful obstacles and resistances to growth. He wrote, "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls."(14) Each stage of individuation has its dangers and difficulties. In his discussion of marriage as a psychological relationship, he observed, "There is no birth of consciousness without pain."(15)

Jung had a continuing interest in understanding human destructiveness and evil. In reflecting on our world he warned: "Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. . . .Psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually nonexistent."(16) Persons become destructive when the opposites within them -- conscious-unconscious, introvert- extrovert persona-shadow, and so on -- are alienated from each other. The unconscious becomes destructive only when it is cut off from consciousness by repression. As an individual gradually claims and develops the neglected dimensions of the unconscious and integrates these balancing aspects with consciousness, the destructiveness of the reclaimed dimensions is transformed so that they feed the creativity of the person's inner life.

Jung had a strong sense of the many ways in which cultures block individuation. He criticized modern Western societies for having lost touch with the individual, with the mythical and the symbolic, and for having overemphasized the development of the rational, analytical, and mechanical aspects of life. Because of the widespread alienation of people from the resources of their unconscious, modern society breeds psychological problems as a swamp breeds mosquitos.

Jung believed that spiritual growth is a central, indispensable dimension of all movement toward wholeness. He saw the religious need of humankind as so universal and powerful that he regarded it as an innate instinct in all human beings: "However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings.... The psychologist of today ought to realize once and for all that we are no longer dealing with questions of dogma and creed. A religious attitude is an element in psychic life whose importance can hardly be overrated."(17) Jung believed that the discovery of adequate meaning is essential for human growth and health. "It is only meaning that liberates." (18) Much of the suffering and many of the problems of people today are derived directly from the lack of meaning in their lives. "Man [sic] needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the almost incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; he is crushed when on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a ‘tale told by an idiot.' It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man."(19)

Jung had a deep appreciation for the spiritual riches of the great Eastern and esoteric traditions, which he saw as balancing and complementing the Western religious traditions. It is the nonrational, mythical, symbolic, and mystical aspects of religions that are healing and growth producing, according to him. Completely demythologized religions lose their power to be channels through which we can appropriate the riches of the unconscious. Religion, in its mythical and mystical aspects, is needed today to save us from culture’s mass-mindedness. Scientific rationalism which makes "objectivity," quantifiable knowledge the only real spiritual authority, feeds mass-mindedness. It causes us to forget that "the distinctive thing about real facts ... is their individuality."(20) Inner experiences of transcendence are our best defense against losing oursense of individuality in the mass. Religion, according to Jung, can help us balance the overpowering influence of objective "reason" and external reality by keeping us in touch with the rich, nonrational side of reality, and giving us a point of reference that transcends society and all the statistical generalizations on which scientific rationalism focuses. Freud saw and reacted against the old arrogance of religion. Jung saw and reacted to the new arrogance of science.(21)

Jung's approach to growth offers particularly rich resources for the growth tasks of the second half of life. He believed that the approaches of Freud and Adler could help people master the growth tasks of the years before thirty-five, which focus mainly on coping constructively with the external world. But the goals of growth and therapy change radically in the second half. As Jung put it: "We must distinguish between a psychology of the morning of life and a psychology of its afternoon."(22) Jung described the mid-years crisis in this way: "No wonder that many bad neuroses appear at the onset of life's afternoon. It is a sort of second puberty, another 'storm and stress' period, not infrequently accompanied by tempests of passion -- the 'dangerous age.' But the problems that crop up at this age are no longer to be solved by the old recipes. The hands of this clock cannot be put back."(23)

Growth work in the second half of life must be inner- directed. The meanings that were found in the outer world in the first half, must now be found within oneself. The mid-years crisis is, at its heart, a spiritual crisis. The values, meanings, and spiritual experiences of one's earlier life must be revised and deepened if one is to cope with the problems and develop the potentials of the second half. Jung wrote: "Among all my patients in the second half of life . . . there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook."(24)

For many people, growth work in life's second half involves claiming the neglected resources in their "other side," their anima or animus, and developing whichever of their four psychic functions have been neglected earlier. A man (myself, for example) whose assertive, rational, out-directed side was overdeveloped in his earlier years, needs in the mid-years to balance this by developing his soft, intuitive, relational, feelingful side. Similarly, a woman who overinvested herself in her feelingful, caring, and relating side during her family-nurturing years, needs to develop her neglected rational and assertive side (expressed perhaps in a job outside the home). It is, of course, better for men and women to develop balanced personalities early in life.

One thing I find useful in facilitating the growth of work addicts is Jung's affirmation of the pleasure principle. To the degree that we are whole, we can enjoy the psychological, interpersonal, and spiritual pleasures of our rich, many-leveled psyches. Whereas Freud put his

trust ultimately in reason and the control of the pleasure principle by the ego (guided by the reality principle), Jung trusted the nonrational, mystical, artistic side of human experience. He saw the glorification of the rational, divorced from this other side, as destructive to individuals and to society. There is something playful about Jung's style that feels liberating and energizing to me. His use of "active imagination" and art in therapy, and his view of the value of fantasies, are expressions of this spirit:

Truth to tell, I have a very high opinion of fantasy. To me, it is actually the maternally creative side of the masculine spirit. . . . All the works of man [sic] have their origin in creative fantasy. . . . The creative activity of the imagination frees man from his bondage to the "nothing but" and liberates in him the spirit of play. As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is playing.(25)

It seems clear that Jung's robust emphasis on the use of intuitive and playful modalities in therapy is one reason for the effectiveness of this approach. Such activities probably produce change by energizing the resources of the right hemisphere of the brain, in both client and therapist. Such an emphasis is needed to complement and balance the rational, analytical (left-brain) modalities, which have dominated most traditional therapies.

Jung's understanding of growth-enabling therapists emphasized their own continuing growth. Analyst and analysand work together on a shared inner journey in which the analyst must also be open to change. In spite of his fascination with theory, Jung observed: "It is a remarkable thing about psychotherapy: you . . . can cure only from one central point; that consists in understanding the patient as a psychological whole and approaching him as a human being, leaving aside all theory and listening attentively to whatever he has to say."(26) As I reflect on the ups and downs in my counseling relationships through the years, I can resonate to Jung's observation that one can recognize effective therapy by the fact that both the therapist and the client change and grow.

Jung believed that effective therapists must be involved in the life of the world and open to learning from it:

Therefore anyone who wants to know the human psyche would be better advised to bid farewell to his study and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experiences of passion in every form in his body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than textbooks a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.(28)

Although Jung's seminal thought offers invaluable growth resources, there are limitations to his system as a total growth therapy. The "mystic" side of me is drawn to some of his esoteric theories. But the danger in this side of Jung's thought is that it lends itself to those who need to make of a therapy a kind of esoteric religion. Jung says some very wise and growthful things, but he sometimes says them in an unnecessarily complicated and speculative way. The highly speculative theories, on which his obviously wise thoughts are allegedly based, often seem superfluous. Many of his ideas stand on their own as valid and useful, independent of the theories.

The central thrust of Jung's system is more growth enabling for outer-directed, extraverted people, in my experience, than for those who are inner-directed. Many of us (in our society, which so values extraversion) do neglect the riches of our inner worlds -- the riches that the artists and mystics of all cultures have explored. For those of us whose inner world is impoverished, Jung's invitation to explore this vast terrain can help us move toward a more balanced awareness of the inner and outer worlds. But some people who are already too inward-turning become even more so as Jungians, investing enormous energy in a seemingly endless exploration of inner reality. The resources in Jung's system, to be used most constructively, need to be balanced by a strong reality-therapy thrust in the therapist. Such a dual thrust is more likely to produce a balance between the inner and the outer reality (which was what Jung meant by wholeness).

From the perspective of feminist psychologists and therapists, Jung is both good and bad news. He recognized and valued the so-called "feminine side" of the psyche (and also of God), which Freud had misunderstood and denigrated. He also showed how wholeness, in both men and women, must involve an integration of both the so-called masculine and feminine sides of their personalities. But in two ways, Jung reflected and reinforced rather than challenged the sexism of his (and our) culture. By labeling the two sides of the psyche "masculine" and "feminine," he unwittingly helped reinforce cultural stereotypes. The soft, nurturing, feelingful side and the assertive, rational, analytical side are human capacities in persons of both sexes. In his writings on women it is clear that he misunderstood their traditional home-centered roles, seeing them as normative expressions of inherent biological necessity. Naomi Goldenberg, a psychologist trained in Jungian therapy, declares: "The anima/animus model and its goal of unification works better for men than for women. The model supports stereotyped notions of what masculine and feminine are by adding mystification to guard against change in the social sphere, where women are at a huge disadvantage."(29)

Jung's therapy, like most traditional and contemporary therapies, was essentially apolitical in that he did not see the therapeutic value and, in the case of obviously oppressed people, the necessity of helping to empower and motivate those in therapy to work to change growth-oppressive social systems. His brilliant critique-of modern, society did not prevent his therapy from being weakened by its hyperindividualism.

Growth Resources from the Existential Therapists

A young woman who knew she had been born out of wedlock, unwanted, the result of an accident, struggled in therapy with her haunting sense of rejection and anxiety. She lamented: "I feel I have no right to be!" The issues that she was confronting are those which existential

therapists regard as crucial in all therapy -- the existential anxiety that stems from the awareness that one might not have been; one's basic sense of identity; and the deep need to be affirmed in one's very essence or being. When such fundamental human issues are ignored by therapists, the growth-enabling effects of their therapy are reduced. The uniqueness of the existential therapies lies not in their methods but in their underlying philosophical assumptions. A variety of therapeutic approaches -- from Ludwig Binswanger's psychoanalytic approach to Viktor Frankl's neo-Adlerian methodology -- have been associated with the existentialist position in philosophy. (30) The existential therapists hold that therapists' basic philosophical assumptions about the human situation have a profound influence on everything they do in the practice of their art -- how they perceive and relate to the client, how they understand the causes of human problems, how they use particular techniques, and how they understand the growth possibilities inherent in crises situations.

I now can reaffirm with even greater conviction (having experienced the existential confrontations of the mid-years) what I wrote earlier:

The basic philosophy of the existential therapies and its understanding of the nature of human growth is also an invaluable resource for growth-oriented secular counselors and therapists.

My own thinking and practice of counseling and therapy have been challenged and enriched through the years by the existentialist views of the human situation. I was first influenced by the impact of Paul Tillich's theology and its underlying existentialist philosophy in his classes at Union Theological Seminary and through my discussions with him as he advised me on my Ph.D. dissertation. My occasional contacts with Rollo May (at the White Institute of Psychiatry and in the Columbia Seminar on Religion and Health) awakened my awareness of the psychotherapeutic relevance of the existential perspective. In more recent years, therapeutic theories of Viktor Frankl and James Bugental have added further existential input to my thinking. I now see that the underlying philosophy on which Growth Counseling is based as a variation on the existential theme. In this section I will discuss some working concepts from the existential therapies that are useful in helping people increase the depth and effectiveness of their growth work. It will be evident, as I explore these themes, that there are prominent existentialist thrusts in several other therapies, including those of Jung, Peris, Assagioli, and Rogers.

The guiding motif in the existentialist therapies is an emphasis on the uniquely human qualities in all people -- e.g., freedom, choice, valuing, awareness, creativity -- and on the distinctiveness of each individual. Therapy aims at helping people develop their own authentic being-in-the-world. The working concepts of these therapies are all variations on this underlying theme.

The problems that bring people to therapy are essentially unconstructive ways of attempting to deal with existential anxiety.

Anxiety in general is the response of the human organism to anything that is perceived as a threat to what one regards as essential to one's welfare or safety. Pathological (neurotic) anxiety arises when contradictory impulses, desires or needs clamor simultaneously for expression or satisfaction. It is the result of inner conflict. It serves the function of keeping material that is acceptable to the self-image repressed. In contrast, existential anxiety is nonpathological or normal anxiety. It arises from the very nature of human existence.(32)

We human beings are the animals who know we will die. We are trapped by our roots in nature with its aging, sickness, tragedy, and eventual death. This existential reality is made profoundly painful by the fact that we are aware on some level (usually not conscious) that we are living-dying creatures. We know that today we are one day closer to death than we were yesterday. This awareness of our mortality is like the background music that plays constantly in many settings, but to which ordinarily we do not consciously listen. Even though we try in countless ways to ignore or blot out the awareness of our finitude, it colors everything we feel, think, and do. Our eventual death and the many forms of living death (e.g., meaninglessness) affect the quality of our consciousness, our relationships, our creativity, and every other aspect of our living.

Psychopathology and the neurotic anxiety that fuels it are abortive attempts to cope with existential anxiety. To paraphrase Tillich's insight, neuroses are ineffective attempts to escape nonbeing by not allowing ourselves to be. Or, as Horney put it, neurotic problems are very costly efforts to avoid the fear of death by not allowing ourselves to feel really alive. To illustrate, when I "depress myself" (as a gestalt therapist would say) and make myself feel only slightly alive, death loses much of its terror because I have so little to lose. But such an avoidance response to existential anxiety is a catch-22 solution because it cuts one off from the only way to constructively cope with this anxiety -- saying yes to life by living creatively.

There are no psychological or psychotherapeutic solutions to existential anxiety. There is no way to make it go away. It is "existential" in the sense that it is inherent in our human experience as self-aware creatures. Our frantic attempts to deny it and run from it make its impact on us more destructive (even "demonic"), waste potentially creative energy, and diminish our awareness and aliveness. But existential anxiety can either cripple our growth or be the deepest source of empowerment of the growth elan. Existential therapies seek to help people learn to confront and cope constructively with existential anxiety, using it as a source of motivation and energy for creativity and growth. As Rollo May states: "The goal of therapy is not to free the patient from anxiety. It is rather, to help free him from neurotic anxiety in order that he may meet the normal anxiety constructively. Indeed, the only way he can achieve the former is to do the latter. Normal anxiety . . . is an inseparable part of growth and creativity."(33)

Existential anxiety can be transformed into a "school,"(34) as the foreparent of contemporary existentialists, Soren Kierkegaard put it. In the context of trust and meaning, it becomes our "teacher" who challenges us to face ourselves, our trivial values, our meaning-starved life-styles. Thus, existential anxiety can become the "mother of the need to know"(35) and a wellspring of energy for developing our potential for full, authentic humanness. Any therapy that focuses only on neurotic anxiety, ignoring the existential anxiety behind it, cuts people off from the basic way of resolving neurotic anxiety -- by confronting and transforming existential anxiety into the energy of becoming!

Neurotic and existential anxiety are intertwined in the problems that bring people to therapy. The woman whose discovery of her accidental, unwanted conception triggered a cold wave of existential anxiety, found, as she explored this anxiety in depth, that it was entangled with her

guilt-laden neurotic conflicts about sex and anger, pleasure and assertiveness. The intense fear of death, which had been a prominent presenting problem when she came for help, was a blend of her neurotic fears of dying (based on her feeling she deserved to die because of her rage and her "dirty" sexual fantasies) and her existential anxiety. Neurotic and existential anxiety tend to reinforce each other. As Tillich observed, "Those who are empty of meaning are easy victims of neurotic anxiety," and a high degree of neurotic anxiety makes one vulnerable to self-destructive ways of responding to one's existential anxiety.(36) In a therapy relationship, the therapist's awareness of the presence of existential anxiety is crucial to helping the client untangle it from neurotic anxiety and then gradually transform it so that it will not feed the neurotic anxiety.

Existential therapies regard a viable philosophy of life and value system as essential to the transformation of existential anxiety. Viktor Frankl points to the collective "value vacuum" in our society that breeds an epidemic of existential neuroses. The inner emptiness in many people is fed by their distorted values, priorities, and beliefs. Rollo May asks:

There is an inverse relation between the soundness of an individual's value system and his anxiety. That is, the firmer and more flexible your values, the more you will be able to meet (existential) anxiety constructively. . . . Arriving at sound values is, in the long run, an integral part of the therapeutic process.(38)

To be most healing and growth-enabling, one's values need to have a firm foundation in a personally meaningful philosophy of life or theology. From his death-camp learnings, Frankl concludes: "Belief in an overmeaning -- whether as a metaphysical concept or in the religious sense of providence -- is of the foremost therapeutic and psychogenic importance. As a genuine faith springs from inner strength, such a belief adds immeasurably to human vitality."(39) Vital, authentic religion (which satisfies what Frankl calls the will-to-meaning) is a powerful resource for growth toward wholeness. "The power of the divine," as Tillich describes it, can enable us to both confront and transform our awareness of finitude.

As I have struggled to handle my own existential anxiety and guilt (the guilt of unlived life) in more life-enhancing ways through the years, I have become aware at times of the power of existential acceptance. This experience, I believe, is available to all persons. When we open ourselves to it, we sense our deep at-homeness in the universe, derived from our acceptance by the loving Spirit who is the source and wellspring of life. Feelings of quiet self-affirmation -- the serenity and enjoyment of simply being oneself -- flow from such an experience. Existential acceptance is a crucial resource for coping constructively with existential anxiety and guilt.

As the existential therapists make clear, therapists should be willing to deal with the spiritual and value issues explicitly in the process of therapy. Because spiritual growth is the key to the total growth of persons toward wholeness, all counselors and therapists need to have the skills to be effective spiritual growth enablers. Unfortunately, pastoral counselors are the only therapeutic professionals who routinely receive academic and clinical training in how to deal effectively with spiritual growth issues.

Existential therapists emphasize the complexity of the interrelation of existential anxiety and growth. The courage to be is really the courage to become. Only as we continue to come alive (which means continuing to develop our unlived potentials) will we be able to transform existential anxiety and guilt. In May's words:

Yet, to become takes courage because the new possibilities, as they emerge, increase existential anxiety.

Anxiety occurs at the point where some emerging potentiality or possibility faces the individual, some possibility of fulfilling his existence; but this very possibility involves the destroying of present security, which therefore gives rise to the tendency to deny the new potentiality. . . . If there were not some . . . potentiality rying to be "born," we would not experience [existential] anxiety.(41)

The process of moving to transform existential anxiety by coming alive more fully is itself fraught with existential anxiety. Yet it is only as one takes the leap of trust into one's emerging potentials, letting go of old securities, that growth is possible.

The existentialist emphasis on the potential power of one's future is closely linked with the awareness that hope has tremendous energy for motivating human change. Awakening a sense of realistic hope for a new future is an essential dynamic in facilitating growth.(42) The pull forward of our living future -- the hopeful future that lives in our imagination -- is a powerful resource for creative change. Affirming goals that effect persons' authentic potentialities is one step toward creating their own futures. But working toward their goals is often ineffective unless persons are encouraged to keep picturing the futures toward which they desire to move. As both Jung and Assagioli make clear, imaging yourself as you'd like to be tends to energize the effort it will require to move toward that potentiality.

Another prominent theme in existential therapies is freedom, with its correlates choice and responsibility. Therapists in the existentialist tradition reject all forms of determinism (including those of Freud and Skinner). Such views are seen as invalid ways of understanding human beings which can be used to escape from the freedom and responsibility that are essential for growth. As James Bugental puts it, the main task of existential therapy is to correct clients' distorted perceptions of themselves and others, which arose in an attempt to block awareness of existential anxiety, and thereby help them "accept the responsibilities and opportunities of authentic being in the world."(43) Growth is understood as involving a continuing series of choices. May writes: "Actually in real life it is a matter of long, uphill growth, to new levels of integration -- growth meaning not automatic progress but re-education, finding new insights, making self-conscious decisions, and throughout being willing to face occasional or frequent struggles."(44) The aim of existential therapy is to encourage people to choose life -- i.e., to choose to really live, fully and authentically. The urgency and importance of making pro-life choices usually doesn't dawn on people until they get in touch with the excessive costs of choosing not to choose (drifting) and of choosing not to live as authentically and fully as they can. Commitment to change and growth is seen by existential therapists as a prerequisite for both depth insight and creative change: "The patient cannot permit himself to get transforming insight or knowledge until he is ready to decide, takes a decisive orientation to life, and has made the preliminary decisions along the way."(45)  

The existential perspective, in my experience, is particularly valuable in crisis counseling. Every significant crisis is a potential spiritual growth opportunity. Experiences of sickness, loss, and bereavement crack the fragile shell of pseudo-omnipotence that most of us wear, confronting us with the brevity and vulnerability of our lives. The existential anxiety from such a crisis can motivate a much-needed reformulation of our life investment plans. Looking death in the face (as one does during medical crises and in bereavement) can enhance life. I remember well an experience of confronting my own vulnerability and fear of death, during an unexpected hospitalization, several years ago. As I gradually emerged from this existential crisis, I recall how precious life felt. The sky looked bluer, the grass greener, people more vivid -- because I felt so much more alive than I had felt for years. Rollo May describes what one experiences in such crises: "With the confrontation of non-being, existence takes on a vitality and immediacy, and the individual experiences a heightened consciousness of himself, his world, and others around him."(46)

What is the process by which the existential therapies enable growth? James Bugental reports that there are two dimensions to this process.(47) The analytic phase is the repair, restorative dimension on which most traditional therapies have concentrated. The ontogogic phase (I call this the existential phase) is the future-oriented potentializing, growth-in-meaning dimension. In my experience, these two dimensions do not necessarily follow one after the other in sequence. Rather, the therapist's awareness that there is a dimension of active growth and spiritual potentializing, in addition to the dimension of removing the blocks to growth (pathology), allows the process to move back and forth between these complementary therapeutic-growth dimensions. A "celebration of being," as Bugental calls it, is often experienced as one develops more of one's unique potentialities.

Viktor Frankl has shed considerable light on practical ways of helping people develop meanings to live by. In his view, there are three kinds of values in which people can find meaning. In creative values, meaning is derived from doing something that one regards as significant: "The conviction that one has a task before him has enormous psychotherapeutic and psychohygenic value. . . . Nothing is more likely to help a person overcome and endure objective difficulties or subjective troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life."(48) In experiential values meaning is derived from something beyond oneself -- for example, enjoying beauty or being loved. In attitudinal values meaning is derived from choosing a life-affirming attitude toward even desperate situations. Frankl recalls: "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number but they offered sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any circumstances, to choose one's own way."(49) Even in terminal illnesses there is a possibility of actualizing attitudinal values: "Whenever one is confronted with an inescapable, unavoidable situation, whenever one has to face a fate which cannot be changed, e.g. in incurable cancer; just then one is given a last chance to actualize the highest value, to fulfill the deepest meaning, the meaning of suffering. For what matters above all is the attitude we take toward suffering, the attitude in which we take our suffering upon ourselves."(50) According to Frankl's approach, the role of the therapist is to challenge people to find their own meanings that are potentially present in their concrete life situations. These often are meanings that emerge from discovering how they can make some contribution to other persons or to the good of humankind. Frankl believes that there must be self-transcendence in one's framework of meaning. Self-actualization, if sought only for its own sake, is self-defeating. Genuine self-actualization is a by-product of fulfilling meanings that involve self-trancendence.

The existentialists' understanding of the therapist as an existential partner is one of their most growth-enabling contributions. To be effective in "rediscovering the real living person amid the compartmentalization and dehumanization of modern culture,"(51) therapists must be genuine persons who are really present with their full humanity including their own awareness of their finitude. The concept of "presence" means really being there with the other, experiencing vividly that particular person's emerging uniqueness in that moment. Growth tends to be most energized in relationships in which the therapist is most present. To be present, we must set aside all the professional ways by which we distance ourselves from clients and seek to dull our own existential anxiety -- e.g., diagnostic labels, psychodynamic theories that we "put" on people, professional roles and status symbols, favorite techniques that we use mechanically. Therapeutic techniques enable healing and growth only when the therapist is really present. Then the techniques flow from the awareness of the unique, changing, growth needs of a particular person. When two persons are really present with each other, there is genuine meeting. They can experience an enlivening I-Thou relationship, to use Martin Buber's familiar term.

The basic philosophical orientation of the existential therapies is an invaluable resource in growth oriented counseling, therapy, and education. This orientation corrects many of the weaknesses of Freud's reductionistic and deterministic philosophy of being human. The existential perspective restores the awareness that we human beings are formed in the image of the Spirit of the universe! The practical value of this philosophy of personhood and of therapy depends, of course, on how it is implemented in actually doing therapy. (In the case of Viktor Frankl, there seems to be some discontinuity, even contradiction, between the existential philosophy he espouses and the methods he uses.(52) Because I have discussed methods of counseling on existential problems and facilitating spiritual growth in detail elsewhere,(53) I will not explore the methods of such counseling and therapy further here.

Growth Resources from Carl Rogers' Therapy

Carl Rogers was born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois. His parents were strict, fundamentalist Christians. During his sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin, he decided to study for the ministry. The following year, at the age of twenty, he spent six months in China as a delegate to the World Student Christian Federation conference in Peking. This experience opened up his world to people of diverse intellectual, cultural, and religious backgrounds. As he interacted with other student delegates his fundamentalist beliefs gradually weakened. He discovered he could think for himself and trust his own experiences. He describes the psychological transformation that resulted: "From the date of this trip, my goals, values, aims and philosophy have been my own and very divergent from the views which my parents held and which I had held up to this point.(54)

After graduating from Wisconsin, Rogers studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he encountered persons influenced by the growth theories of John Dewey. His doubts about his religious commitment increased, and he decided to transfer to Teachers College, Columbia University, where he completed a Ph.D. in educational psychology with E. L. Thorndike. During his twelve years at a child guidance center in Rochester, New York, his therapeutic orientation changed from a formal, directive approach toward what became client-centered therapy. He acknowledges the influence of Otto Rank's thought in this transformation. Subsequently, Rogers taught psychology at Ohio State University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin. In 1963 he resigned his professorship at Wisconsin and moved to LaJolla, California, where he was one of the founders of the Center for the Studies of the Person, a loose-knit training-research group of persons from various helping professions. He now spends his time writing, lecturing, relating to his family and colleagues, and gardening. Of the latter activity he says: "I garden. Those mornings when I cannot find time. . .1 feel cheated. My garden supplies the same intriguing question I have been trying to meet in my professional life: What are the effective conditions of growth? But in my garden, though the frustrations are just as immediate, the results, whether success or failure, are more quickly evident.(55)

Rogers' system was the first American psychotherapy that achieved widespread prominence. His ideas and methods have had a significant influence in America on education, industry, group work, and pastoral psychology, in addition to counseling and therapy. No therapy with the possible exception of Freud's has had as great an impact on the development of pastoral counseling.

My first training in pastoral counseling was Rogerian in its orientation. I had more than two years of valuable therapy with a person whose methods were mainly client-centered. However, in retrospect I now see that my growth could have been furthered much more rapidly if that therapist had been trained in more active and confrontational methods. Rogers' vision of growth, described in almost lyrical prose, helped to awaken my interest in exploring the growth approach further. Although my "revised model" for pastoral counseling(56) was an attempt to overcome certain inadequacies in the Rogerian and Freudian models of therapy, my model was built on many of the contributions of both these therapists.

Four motifs in Rogers' approach to counseling and therapy represent continuing contributions to the psychotherapeutic enterprise -- his growth orientation; his emphasis on listening responsively and acceptingly to clients; his awareness that the emotional quality of the therapeutic relationship is the key to whether or not it nurtures growth; and his commitment to subjecting the therapeutic process and outcome to careful research. When I read Rogers and when I have heard Rogers speak, I am impressed by the depth and vigor of his growth orientation.

Rogers' thought, particularly about inner, psychological growth, includes a wealth of insights that are valuable for growth-oriented counselors, therapists, and teachers. More than any other therapist, he illuminates the flow and direction of creative change within persons. In his major theory book, On Becoming a Person, Rogers declares:

The growth goal toward which Rogers' therapy seeks to help people move is the "fully functioning person." This concept has much in common with Maslow's self-actualizing person. Rogers' goal has many facets. Although persons move in ways that express their uniqueness, Rogers identifies what he sees as some universal directions of the process. These include letting go of facades and becoming more real and transparent, acquiring greater awareness of one's total inner experiences, listening to and trusting the guidance of one's organism, rediscovering and accepting those parts of oneself which have been "disowned," learning to live fully in the now.

In general, the evidence shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experiences, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning. It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feeling and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one's changing experience, realness and closeness of relationships, a unity and integration of functioning.(58)

As people discover themselves more fully, they automatically come to trust and affirm what they discover:

Rogers' profound trust in the dependability of the growth elan is clear:

Yet, though spontaneous, the growth process is not easy: This process of the good life is not . . . a life for the faint hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.(61)

Rogers' underlying theoretical concept, the phenomenological perspective, is one illuminating way of understanding persons. This view holds that each person's unique phenomenal field, the total "world" of that particular person's experiencing, determines her or his behavior. Those parts of this field which one perceives as relatively stable attributes of oneself constitute the self-concept. Only the configuration of perceptions of the self that are admitted to awareness are a part of the self-concept. Rogerian therapy aims at enabling people to change their self-concept in some of the ways described above.

The relationship between being and becoming in Rogers is almost identical to the paradoxical theory of change later articulated in gestalt therapy: "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. I believe that I have learned this from my clients as well as within my own experience -- that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come almost unnoticed.(62)

Rogers operates out of what might be called a "natural childbirth" understanding of growth in therapy: "I can state my overall hypothesis in one sentence. If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth and change, and personal development will occur."(63) The therapist's only role is to provide such a relationship: "I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality. As I stand in awe at the emergence of a self, a person, I see a birth process in which I had had an important and facilitative part.(64)

There are six psychological conditions that are both necessary and sufficient to facilitate growth:

A psychological contact (sense of each other's presence) between therapist and client, a state of incongruence in the client, a state of congruence in the therapist, unconditional positive regard for and empathic understanding of the client by the therapist, and the client's perception of the therapist's positive regard for and empathic understanding of him. Diagnosis, professional knowledge, are not considered necessary by Rogers and may, indeed, . . . be obstructive.(65)

The growthful quality of therapeutic relationships is dependent on the degree of authenticity and actualization of the therapist. Rogers observes: "The degree to which I can create relationships which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons is a measure of the growth I have achieved myself. In some respects this is a disturbing thought, but it is also a promising and challenging one.(66)

In his later thought, Rogers has moved beyond the exclusively intrapsychic focus of his earlier books to devote more attention to growthful relationships. In Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives he concludes that four basic elements make for long-term sustained growth by both persons: (1) mutual commitment to working together on the relationship because that relationship is enriching their love and lives and they wish it to grow; (2) open and full communication of feelings, positive and negative; (3) not accepting the roles and expectations of others; (4) continuing personal growth by both persons toward becoming the unique persons they potentially are. In such relationships each person lives out of this awareness:

As do the feminist therapists, Rogers affirms the essential equality of any relationship that is mutually growthful.

One of Rogers' valuable contributions is his critique of the way most educators overemphasize intellectual skills and undervalue the intuitive and emotional dimensions of whole-person learning. He is critical of the way they defeat self-learning (the only real learning) and stifle creativity by their built-in coercion and by seeing the student as the passive, dependent recipient of the "knowledge" transmitted by the teacher. Rogers quotes one man's reflections on the deadening effects of his graduate training: "This coercion had such a deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any problem distasteful for me for an entire year."(68) The student Rogers quotes was Albert Einstein!

Rogers' influence, together with my own disillusionment with the results of traditional teaching methods, has encouraged me to seek ways to make my classes more growthful. In the last ten years I have moved increasingly toward experiential teaching (using self-awareness exercises, role playing of counseling methods, live demonstrations of growth groups, and so forth), which involves the students' own feelings, responses, and needs; asking the students to draw up their own "learning contract" based on what they want to get from a given course or workshop; expecting students to participate in the teaching by sharing in some systematic way the insights they have discovered to be meaningful; revealing my own struggles, uncertainties, and weaknesses; and asking the students to evaluate anonymously the course, including my teaching.

In spite of Rogers' pioneering growth contributions, his approach has some serious inadequacies.

Although he challenges and rejects the pathology model that had dominated most traditional psychotherapies since Freud, Rogers retains the predominant intrapsychic focus that has weakened the growth impact of these therapies. This focus has been broadened to some extent in his writings on small groups, on close relationships such as marriage, and on intergroup relationships. But his approach to these relationships is mainly an extrapolation of the principles of one-to-one counselor-client relationships. Rogers under-emphasizes the special dynamics within and between social systems (e.g., families, industries, schools, economic-political systems) which must be changed if the whole system is to nurture rather than diminish individual growth within it. Even though he has given much attention to groups, he does not emphasize the fact that every personal problem is rooted in and fed by its social context. Furthermore he does not emphasize the wholesale diminishing of potentializing (for both women and men) caused by institutional-societal sexism or the therapeutic necessity of empowering persons to work together to eradicate systemic growth oppression through social-political action. Of the six dimensions of whole-person growth,(69) Rogers concentrates most of his energy on two dimensions (inner psychological and relational growth), underemphasizing the other four.

A closely related deficiency in Rogers' approach is a neglect of the' power dynamics of growth, which Adler and the radical therapists rightly emphasize as crucial. Most therapists would agree on the importance of the positive qualities in therapeutic relationships that Rogers sees as essential for making them growth-enabling. Research findings reported by Charles Truax and Robert Carkhuff show that the therapeutic triad -- empathic understanding, positive regard, and congruence -- are highly correlated with constructive change in therapy whatever the conceptual orientation of the therapist.(70) But few therapists would agree that these positive qualities are all that is needed for effective therapy with all types of persons. Rogers' approach is excellent for establishing healing-growthing relationships, but with many people, it is what the therapist does within these relationships, after they are established, that determines the outcome! For clients who are crippled by self-rejection and guilt, unconditional (although I doubt if either acceptance or positive regard can ever be totally "unconditional" in us finite human therapists) positive regard and acceptance often are precisely what they need for healing and growth. But Rogers leaves no place for the constructive confrontation that is essential in working growthfully with many other people. To illustrate, among the people who come to our pastoral counseling and growth center for help, many desperately need a counselor who has the caring and courage to "speak the truth in love" to them. Persons with manipulative life-styles can easily manipulate passive therapists, who simply follow their lead. For persons with weak or confused consciences and those who act out their inner pain in ways that are damaging to themselves and others, the most loving and growthful thing a therapist can do is to confront them honestly with the consequences of their behavior! To fail to hold up the reality of their destructive behavior, in a context of genuine caring for them, is to withhold what they must have if they are to change. Rogers builds his total approach on only half the growth formula.(71) By making caring and acceptance, without confrontation with reality, the sole basis for therapeutic change, he provides an inadequate foundation for growth.

A related inadequacy in Rogers' understanding of therapy is his lack of awareness of the ingenuity and power of the resistances to growth within us human beings. His faith in the spontaneous flowering of persons in an accepting-caring-honest relationship is naive and ineffective when one does therapy with those who are locked into self-sabotaging, self-deluding defenses against having to change. The dark, out-of-awareness destructiveness, the tragic trappedness, and the growth-stifling misuse of their limited degree of choicefulness (factors that were so brilliantly illuminated by Freud and other depth therapists) are virtually ignored by Rogers. It seems as if, in freeing himself from moralistic fundamentalism, he dismissed any need for a depth understanding of human pathology, evil, and destructiveness. When one encounters persons in whom the growth elan has been frozen for many years in a self-crippling psychosis, the inadequacy of Rogers' understanding of such grotesquely distorted personhood is evident.

The exclusive use of Rogers' midwifery model does not allow therapists to develop the differential methodology that is essential in responding to the needs of persons who require more active, structured, educative approaches. It behooves all therapists and teachers to respect the growth elan in people and to know that only as that vital energy is activated will they grow. But it does not follow that it is necessary or constructive to put all the responsibility for the direction, pace,

and content of the therapeutic sessions onto them. In my experience, clients who are bright, verbal, and strongly motivated to change (as many of Rogers' clients must have been) often respond growthfully to a client-centered approach. But the majority of hurting people seen by mental health therapists and by ministers for counseling respond more rapidly and growthfully when therapists use more active, confrontational, and reeducative methods as these become appropriate in the flow of each session. In his resistance to behavioral methods (a la Skinner), Rogers seems to dismiss the fact that active, purposive reeducation (cognitive, relational, and behavioral) is precisely what some people must have to cope with life more constructively.

Many people need active involvement of the therapist as creative teacher, coach, and guide on their growth journey. Alcoholics, for example, often experience relatively passive therapists as essentially withholding.

Rogers' phenomenological perspective has serious limitations when it is used as the only way of understanding human beings. The dimension of depth and mystery (represented in psychoanalysis by the unconscious) is underemphasized in Rogers' thought. Furthermore, by itself, the phenomenological view leads to a subjective hyper-individualism that weakens Rogers' approach to therapy; Rogers declares:

When one actively feels as though it is valuable or worth doing, it is worth doing. (72)

The emphasis on trusting their own feelings and wants can be a growthful corrective for people who have allowed the values, demands, and expectations of others to straitjacket their autonomy. But in the complexity and ambiguity of human relationships, many decisions can be made creatively only by dialogue and negotiation with those whose lives and needs intertwine and often conflict with our own. Furthermore, people who have been reared by permissive parents who did not set firm limits tend to use this emphasis to legitimate their narcissistic "me-ism."

Rogers' approach lacks a place for either explicit value reformulation or for actively facilitating spiritual growth. Apparently he does not regard either of these as essential. In a conversation with Paul Tillich, Rogers made his own lack of any need for a spiritual dimension clear.(73) One can affirm the values that are implicit in his philosophy of therapy -- the value of feelings, of inner freedom and autonomy, of self-honesty (congruence), of empathic understanding and of respect for each person's unique growth choices and direction. But in a time when value confusion reinforced by growth-strangling faith systems often is at the center of the problems that bring people for help, it is essential that counselors, therapists, and teachers be competent and free to deal with these issues explicitly whenever appropriate.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in Jung's Therapy

Goldenberg, Naomi. Changing of the Gods, Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Chap. 5 is a superb critique of Jungian psychology as it relates to religion.

Hanna, Charles B. The Face of the Deep: The Religious Ideas of C. G. Jung. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967. Deals with Jung's ideas about God and the unconscious, sin and guilt, the psychology of the soul, and the present spiritual crisis.

Hillman, James. Insearch: Psychology and Religion. New York: Scribner's, 1967. Based on lectures given to ministers on analytical psychology and pastoral counseling; includes a discussion of the feminine grounding of religion.

Jung, CarIG. Memories, Dreams and Reflections. New York: Random House, 1961. Jung's powerful, candid autobiography provides an excellent introduction to his major ideas.

--- Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967; Pantheon Books, 1953-67. Includes almost all of Jung's writings.

--- Modern Man in Search of a Soul. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933. Discusses the nature of spiritual needs and how they are frustrated in the modern world.

Sanford, John A. Dreams, God's Forgotten Language. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968. A Jungian pastoral counselor's understanding of dreams.

Singer, June. Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. A clear description of Jungian theory and therapy.

Ulanov, Ann, and Ulanov, Barry. Religion and the Unconscious. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975. Discusses the function of religion in the human psyche; mythology and religious experience; suffering and salvation from a Jungian perspective.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in the Existential Therapists

Boss, Medard. Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, trans. Ludwig B. Lefebre. New York: Basic

Books, 1963. Describes his basic revision of psychoanalytic theory and practice as these were influenced by existentialism.

Bugental, James F. T. The Search for Authenticity. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. Presents an existential-analytic approach to psychotherapy reflecting the influence of Maslow, Tillich, and May.

Clinebell, Howard. "Counseling on Religious-Existential Problems" in Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, chap. 14.

---"Spiritual Growth -- The Key to All Growth," in Growth Counseling, chap. 4.

---"Philosophical-Religious Factors in the Etiology and Treatment of Alcoholism," in Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, September, 1963, pp. 473-88.

Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. New York: Pocket Books, 1963. A description of his death camp experiences and a brief statement about logotherapy.

---The Doctor and the Soul: An Introduction to Logotherapy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Describes the basic philosophy and methods of this type of existential therapy,

May, Rollo, et al., eds. Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. New York: Basic Books, 1958. A collection of papers on existential psychotherapy by May, H. F. Ellenberger, Ludwig Binswanger, et al.

May, Rollo, ed. Existential Psychology. New York: Random House, Includes papers by Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Gordon Allport, in addition to two by May.

May, Rollo. Man's Search for Himself. New York: W. W. Norton, 1953. Applies the learnings from existential therapy to help readers understand the human predicament and rediscover their selfhood.

---Psychology and the Human Dilemma. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967. Essays on the contemporary situation, anxiety, existential psychotherapy, freedom, and responsibility.

Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. Explores the relationship between existential and pathological anxiety, theologically and psychologically.

Further Exploration of Growth Resources in Carl Rogers' Therapy

Hart, J. T., and Tomlinson, M. E., eds. New Directions in Client-Centered Therapy. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Major figures in various fields discuss how they have extended Rogers' approach in therapy, education, and research,

Rogers, Carl. Client-Centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. Rogers' first formal

statement on theories of personality and of therapy. He now sees the statement as too rigid, but it is still a significant book.

---On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Spells out in a personal way his major concepts.

---Freedom to Learn. Columbus: Chas. E. Merrill, 1969. Rogers' clearest challenge to educators; he develops the view that most education discourages real learning.

---Carl Rogers on Encounter Groups. New York: Harper, 1970. Reports his findings on the process of small growth groups.

---Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives. New York: Harper, 1972. Explores various approaches to marriage, reporting on factors which make for long-term growthful relationships.

NOTES

1. Some of the biographical data in this section are from Fadiman and Frager. Personality and Personal Growth, pp. 54-57.

2. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Random House, 1961). p. 174.

3. Ibid., p. 199.

4. Ibid., p. 297.

5. Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt. Brace, 1933), pp. 110-11.

6. Ibid., p. 117.

7. Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1967-). 16:355.

8. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New York: World, 1958). pp. 193-94.

9. Ibid.. p. 182.

10. From a letter of Jung dated January 13, 1948.

11. See James Hillman, Insearch: Psychology and Religion (New York: Scribner's. 1967). pp. 57ff.

12. Collected Works. 16:454, 448.

13. Letter dated August 12, 1960.

14. "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy." The Portable Jung, Joseph Campbell, ed. (New York: Viking, 1971). p. 362.

15. The Portable Jung, p. 167.

16. Psyche and Soul (New York: Doubleday, 1958). pp. 49-50.

17. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. p. 67.

18. "Psychology or the Clergy." Collected Works. 11:330.

19. Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1968), p. 76.

20. The Unconscious Self (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), p. 9.

21. Gerald Sykes, The Hidden Remnant (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 71.

22. Modem Man in Search of a Soul, p. 58.

23. Two Essays, pp. 84-85.

24. Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 229.

25. Ibid., p. 66.

26. Jung's Letters, ed. G. Adler (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1973, p. 456.

27. Collected Works, 10:177.

28. Collected Works, 7:409.

29. The Changing of the Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 59.

30. The thought of Martin Heidegger, whom Rollo May calls "the fountainhead of present-day existentialist thought," has had a strong impact on the theory of several psychotherapists.

31. Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, p. 263. This statement was written before my consciousness was raised regarding sexist language. It applies equally to clergywomen!

32. Howard Clinebell, "Philosophical-Religious Factors in the Etiology and Treatment of Alcoholism," p. 477.

33. Psychology and the Human Dilemma (New York: Van Nostrand, 1967), p. 81 (emphasis added).

34. Saren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 104.

35. Fred Berthold, Jr., "Anxious Longing," in Constructive Aspects of Anxiety, Seward Hiltner and Karl Menninger, eds. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1963), p. 71.

36. Tillich, The Courage to Be, p. 67.

37. Existential Psychology (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 98.

38. Psychology and the Human Dilemma, p. 82.

39. The Doctor and the Soul (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), pp. 37-38.

40. Existence (New York: Basic Books, 1958), p. 41.

41. Ibid., p. 52.

42. See Growth Counseling, p. 48.

43. Bugental, The Search for Authenticity (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), p. 31.

44. Man's Search for Himself (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), p. 136.

45. Existence, p. 87.

46. Ibid., p. 49.

47. Bugental, The Search for Authenticity, p. 15.

48. The Doctor and the Soul, pp. 61-62.

49. Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books. 1963), p. 65.

50. The Doctor and the Soul, p. 114.

51. May, Existence, pp. 14-15.

52. Frankl's paradoxical intention methods seem to bear little relation to his existential philosophy; his description of how he does therapy with particular persons gives the impression of being manipulative and highly authority-centered.

53. See Growth Counseling, chap. 4; Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, chap. 14.

54. Carl Rogers, in History of Psychology in Autobiography, eds. E. Boring and G. Lindzen, vol. 5 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1967). p. 351.

55. Carl Rogers, "In Retrospect: Forty-Six Years," The American Psycholo- gist, 29:122-23; quoted by James Fadiman and Robert Frager in their succinct biographical statement on Rogers in

Personality and Personal Growth, pp. 279-84.

56. See Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, pp. 27-40.

57. On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 181.

58. Ibid., pp. 64-65.

59. Ibid., p. 110.

60. Ibid., p. 35.

61. Ibid.. p. 196.

62. Ibid., p. 17.

63. Ibid., p. 33.

64. Client-Centered Therapy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), pp. x-xl.

65. Harper, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, 36 Systems (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Spectrum Books, Prentice-Hall, 1959).

66. On Becoming a Person, p. 56.

67. Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives (New York: Harper. 1972), p. 209.

68. Freedom to Learn (Columbus: Chas. E. Merrill, 1969), p. 177.

69. See Growth Counseling, chap. I, for a discussion of these six dimensions.

70. See Charles B. Truax and Robert R. Carkhuff, Toward Effective Counseling and Psychotherapy (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.. 1967), p. 25.

71. Growth Counseling, pp. 55-56.

72. On Becoming a Person, p. 119, p. 22.

73. This is from a dialogue between the two men recorded shortly before Tillich's death.

Resources from Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1900. He studied sociology and psychology at the universities of Frankfurt and Munich and Heidelberg, and was trained in psychoanalysis at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin. He came to the United States in 1934 and was affiliated with the International Institute for Social Research in New York until 1939. In 1941 he joined the faculty of Bennington College. In 1951 he became a professor at the National University of Mexico. For a number of years Fromm lived and wrote in Cuernavaca, Mexico. His death in March, 1980, at his home in Muralto, Switzerland, ended the career of one of the most creative thinkers and prolific psychoanalytic writers of our times.

When I was a student at Columbia University in the late 1940s, Fromm was a resource person for a small cross-discipline group of faculty and graduate students who met regularly to discuss papers on the relationship of religion and health. I recall the excitement that I experienced when he presented his ideas and interacted with members of our group on two occasions. Through the years, my thought and practice have been influenced repeatedly by the insights of this therapist-theoretician.

Fromm's major contributions to growth-oriented teachers, counselors, and therapists are his understanding of the ways in which cultures constrict or nurture human individuation (Fromm's term for potentializing) and his discussion of the importance of existential- philosophical -religious factors in all human growth. Fromm gives psychoanalysis a broad philosophical and cross-cultural orientation that provides a fresh context for growth work.

His discussion begins with a description of the existential dilemma that we human beings face. Humans are animals who have lost our instincts (our fixed, inborn patterns of response) and have developed reason, self-awareness, and autonomy to replace them. We are freaks of nature. Deep within us there is a nostalgia for our "lost Edens," the primitive unity with nature and the herd that we have lost in our evolutionary development. Thus there is a two-way pull within us -- toward autonomy and individuation, on the one hand, and toward conformity and merging our identity with the group on the other. This creates a continuing conflict between the need to become our autonomous selves and the need to feel a part of the larger whole.  

In Fromm's thought, as in Adier's, Horney's, and Sullivan's, human beings are essentially social. Our culture molds our basic personal pattern and determines our degree of wholeness. Each society tends to produce what Fromm calls a "social character," a common personality core that is required to cope with that society. This pattern is created in individual children by the way they are reared.

Our self-awareness, though it helps define what is unique and precious about being human, also renders us prey to guilt and to the anxiety stemming from our existential aloneness and our mortality. The inherent dichotomies of the human situations -- e.g., autonomy vs. belonging, life vs. death -- are bearable only within a sense of meaning and a sense of community with others who share our existential fate. When people are alienated from a community of shared meanings, as countless millions now are, the inescapable human dichotomies become unbearable. They produce a variety of destructive problems and nonproductive life orientations. Many people try to escape from the existential dichotomies by embracing one side and rejecting the other. When the mass insecurities fostered by a society in rapid transition reinforce the feeling of vulnerability derived from personal autonomy, people tend to "escape from freedom"; they lose their anxiety but also their freedom by overidentifying with some authoritarian ideology, leader, or system, political or religious. Fromm analyzes the social psychology of Nazi Germany (from which he fled) and of Reformation Calvinism to illustrate how people escape from freedom when it becomes too threatening.(1)

The goal of growth and of therapy is what Fromm calls the productive person. Such persons develop their unique potentialities and thus become capable of genuine love, creativity, productive work, and participation in a community of shared meanings. In this way, the productive person is able to cope constructively with the inescapable existential dilemmas. If this maturing does not occur, four types of nonproductive life-orientations (and character structures) develop in the attempt by persons to defend themselves from feelings of existential insignificance and aloneness. Receptive type persons require constant approval and reassurance from others. Exploitative type people take what they want or need from others. Hoarding type people center their lives on defensively saving and owning. They try to possess others by behavior that is often disguised as love. Marketing-oriented people experience themselves as commodities whose value is limited to their value for use by others. They say, and mean, "I had to sell myself to that prospective employer." The marketing orientation is the pervasive social character produced by a capitalist society like ours. All four of these nonproductive personality types represent an alienation from our potential for real love, self-esteem, and creative living.

Fromm provides important resources for facilitating spiritual growth. With Jung and Assagioli, he sees religion (broadly defined) as a fundamental need of all human beings. He points to the crucial distinction between growth-inhibiting and growth-enabling religion: "There is no one without a religious need, need to have a frame of orientation and an object of devotion. . . .The question is not religion or not but which kind of religion, whether it is one furthering man's [sic]

development, the unfolding of his specifically human powers, or one paralyzing them."(2) He describes neurosis as a. private religion (which reverses Freud's view that religions are a collective childish neurosis of humankind); he sees neurosis as a regression to primitive forms of religion. Fromm's critique of authority-centered religions as inherently growth-limiting is a valuable contribution to the spiritual growth work of individuals and to their development of growth-enabling religious beliefs:

Fromm sees clearly that for many people Christianity is a thin veneer over the idolatrous worship of power, success, and the authority of the marketplace; or it is a cover masking their idolatrous fixation on their clan, religious or ethnic group, or nation-state. Fromm's insights about the dynamics of our modern idolatries illuminate many of the growth-blocking religious beliefs, practices, and institutions one encounters both in doing therapy and in society.

In his books Psychoanalysis and Religion and Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism,(4) he spells out his understanding of growth-enabling religion. This is essentially a religion in which people do not give their power and freedom away to external deities or to idolatries such as those mentioned above. It is a rational, nonauthoritarian religion. Fromm's analysis of authority-centered religions and of their ethical systems is a critique that all religious leaders and pastoral counselors need to take seriously and use to exorcise the growth-inhibiting beliefs and practices of their own religious systems. One can learn from his critique without necessarily agreeing with his underlying nontheistic metaphysical assumption.

In a time when more and more people are rejecting old authority-centered standards of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, Fromm's contributions to a humanistic, psychologically informed ethic (in Man for Himself) offer valuable resources for growth work. In contrast to approaches to the good life which derive their criteria from external sources of authority, Fromm looks for criteria in the depths of persons and in society. He asks the key question for any growth-centered ethic -- which ethical guidelines contribute to the growth of creative, loving, productive people? The good is defined as that in individuals and in social institutions which makes for the unfolding of full human possibilities. The bad is whatever blocks growth toward full humanness. The massive collapse of old authority-centered value systems provides humankind today with an unprecedented opportunity and necessity to grow up morally. This can happen only as we develop self-validating ethical guidelines to help us maximize the full potentialities of persons. Fromm's understanding of ethics can offer valuable insights concerning how a planetary ethic-of-growth can be developed. He makes it clear that our moral problem today is that we have become alienated from our real selves, that we treat ourselves, and therefore others as things. Ethically speaking, our period of history is "an end and a beginning, pregnant with possibilities."(5) The outcome of this period of transition will depend on whether human beings have the courage to become their potential selves -- loving, creative, and productive.

Fromm's understanding of human evil provides an approach that can help human potentials approaches to education and therapy avoid superficial optimism. In The Heart of Man and subsequently in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness he rejects both sentimental optimism and the view that human beings are inherently evil. He sees our greatest problem as our individual and collective destructiveness and points to the crucial importance of discovering ways to resolve it. He identifies a variety of types of destructiveness in persons and in society. There is playful aggressiveness motivated by the display of skill, not by destructiveness per se. There is reactive or defensive violence motivated by fear when individual or collective life, freedom, property, or dignity are threatened. Much destructiveness of this type results from our incestuous tribal ties to family, clan, culture, and nation. If the collective narcissism of such limited circles of concern is threatened or wounded, defensive violence results.

Another contemporary form of violence which is very prevalent results from the shattering of old faith systems. Another form of violence is compensatory. A person "who cannot create wants to destroy. He thus takes revenge on life for negating him."(6) Compensatory destructiveness is a negative substitute for making a creative impact on the world. The only cure for this form of evil is the fuller development of love and reason, autonomy and creativity.

Destructiveness and violence can also be malignant, as in sadism. We human beings apparently are the only animals who become driven by the lust to hurt, torture, and kill others of their own species. This form of violence today is threatening the very survival of humankind. It is motivated, according to Fromm, by a distorted religious need, the passion to have absolute, unrestricted control over another being, as a way of attempting to overcome existential anxiety. "The experience of absolute control over another being, of omnipotence so far as he, she or it is concerned, creates the illusion of transcending the limitations of human existence, particularly for those whose lives are deprived of productivity and joy. Sadism . . . is the transformation of impotence into the experience of omnipotence; it is the religion of psychical cripples."(7) The extreme forms of malignant destructiveness are labeled "necrophilous" by Fromm. The necrophile is a lover of death and destructiveness. Hitler is an example of a pure necrophile who was passionately fascinated by force, mechanical things, killing, and death.

More than any other therapist, Fromm has brought the searchlight of depth psychology to bear on the historical and societal roots of individual problems. In The Sane Society and elsewhere, he describes factors in our society which make for widespread alienation of persons from their powers and potentials. He shares his vision of a sane society in which human possibilities will be maximized. The road to such a society is the creation of an economic system in which "every working person would be an active and responsible participant, where work would be attractive and meaningful," where every worker would participate in management and decision-making.(8) The sane society would be one that is organized to serve the basic need of all human beings -- for relatedness and love, for a sense of inclusive identity, for creativeness, for a

frame or meaning, and for a satisfying object of devotion.

From the growth perspective, there are several weaknesses in Fromm's approach. His nontheistic belief system renders his religious orientation two-dimensional. He lacks awareness of a Source of inspiration and creativity that is both beyond and within human beings. Only such an awareness can give depth and height dimensions to what Fromm calls one's "frame of orientation and object of devotion." Although I find his critique of authority-centered ethics convincing in the sense that it is clear that we must find moral criteria that are self-validating in human experience, his orientation here also seems two-dimensional. There is no sense that what is best for human potentializing is somehow undergirded by ultimate spiritual Reality.

Fromm has a tendency to demonize authority in general. This tendency is partially offset by his recognition of the need for "rational authority," the authority of competence, to replace the attributive authority of status or position in a more humanizing society. Although I agree that the maximum distribution of power and decision-making is desirable and growth-producing, it is clear that some structured authority is also essential in all social systems. Such authority need not be oppressive provided there are strong checks on its exercise, built into the system.

From a feminist therapy perspective, Fromm, like most therapists, lacks a full appreciation of the centrality of sexism as a fundamental form of human oppression. From the viewpoint of radical therapies he does not emphasize the ways in which empowerment and involvement in changing institutions can be profoundly healing and growth-enabling for oppressed persons. His therapeutic theory is essentially individualistic in spite of his brilliant insights into the societal roots of pathology.

Resources in the Therapy of Karen Homey

Karen Horney was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1885. Her father was a stem Norwegian sea captain; her mother was Dutch and much more open in her thinking and attitudes than was her father. Horney's medical education was received at the University of Berlin and her psychotherapeutic training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where she subsequently became a lecturer. She was analyzed by two of the best-known training analysts in Europe -- Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs. At the invitation of Franz Alexander she came to the United States in 1932 and became associate director of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. She moved to New York in 1934 and taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Becoming increasingly dissatisfied with orthodox psychoanalysis, she joined with persons of similar views in founding the American Institute of Psychoanalysis. She was the dean of this institute until her death in 1952.

In spite of her orthodox Freudian training, Homey became remarkably growth-oriented in her understanding of human beings and of therapy. Horney's writings influenced my thinking significantly during my years of training as a counselor-therapist. I agree with this evaluation of her contemporary relevance: "Her ideas and understanding of the human person are as alive and fresh today as they were when she first shared them through her writings."(9) Paul Tillich (for whom Horney was a therapist) described the dynamic quality of her personhood in a moving statement at her funeral: "Few people whom one encountered were so strong in the affirmation of their being, so full of the joy of living, so able to rest in themselves, and to create without cessation beyond themselves."(10)

Horney's search for deeper understanding of the distortions and possibilities of human personality was linked with the willingness to challenge many of Freud's ideas. In April, 1941, she walked out of the New York Psychoanalytic Society singing "Go Down, Moses," having been told that her views were utterly out of keeping with psychoanalytic theory. There is something winsome about a person who had the courage to defy the rigidities of the psychoanalytic establishment in this

way.

Karen Horney's writings include a wealth of insights of value to growth-oriented counselors, therapists, and teachers. Along with Erich Fromm (with whom she was associated at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and later in New York City) and with Adler, Rank, and Sullivan, she rejected Freud's compartmentalized conflict-centered, biologically reductionistic model of human personality in favor of an emphasis on the functioning of the self as whole in its relational context. She saw that the concept of a unifying, active center of personality is essential to the view that persons possess some freedom to respond intentionally to their situation. Both Horney and Fromm understood personal growth as being centered in the interaction of persons with their particular familial and cultural context. Both therapists shared an interest in understanding how sociological factors create growth-blocking or growth-enabling environments. Both saw their systems as falling within the general framework of psychoanalytic thought, but both rejected Freud's fundamental assumption that the essence of human development is the working out of biological drives and impulses.

Horney saw human beings as possessing the essential resources for wholeness:

Therapy, according to Horney, aims at enhancing self- awareness and self-knowledge. Thus, insight is not an end in itself but "a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth"(12) toward one's full potential. Healthy persons are spontaneous in their feelings, actively assume responsibility for their own lives, accept mutual obligations in interdependent relationships, are without emotional pretense, and are able to put themselves wholeheartedly into the work, beliefs, and relationships that are important to them. She saw that growth toward wholeness occurs in relationships of love and respect and that neurotic character patterns are learned by children when their relationships lack these essential qualities.  

Horney uses the term real self to mean the potential self -- all that one has the capacity to become. In contrast, the actual self is the way one is at present. In even sharper contrast, the idealized self is the exaggerated self-image by which people seek to maintain feelings of worth. Maintaining this perfectionistic self-picture wastes enormous energy, which could be used for growth toward actualizing the real self. This idealized image functions as a substitute for real self-esteem, creates self-idolatry, demands a pattern of rigid relationships, and makes it necessary to constantly compare oneself with others.

In her understanding of human growth, Horney shared with other analysts an emphasis on the lasting influence of the relationships of the first six years. But she regarded these formative experiences as determinative only in persons who have suffered severe emotional deprivation. A deeply hurt and therefore disturbed child, will turn school experiences as well as later relationships into reenactments of their pathology-fostering family relationships. In contrast, relatively healthy children tend to respond appropriately to the actual quality of the school relationships and of later experiences. Like Adler, Horney emphasizes the importance of growth experiences after as well as before age six. A reasonably growthful childhood leaves a person free to respond directly and appropriately to the pressures and possibilities of later life. The primary focus in Homey's therapy is on the situation one is now facing and on the current function of behavior, rather than on the discovery of the infantile roots of the problem. For those of us who lead growth groups and do education and therapy mainly with adults, this is a valuable and useful emphasis. Horney's insights about how excessive anxiety and low self-esteem stifle growth are relevant when working with painfully blocked growth. She uses the term "basic anxiety" to mean the deep feeling that is at the heart of severely truncated growth (neuroses). Basic anxiety is "the feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world."(13) Neurotic patterns of relating are desperate attempts to prevent oneself from being overwhelmed by this most painful of feelings.

Horney identified three major neurotic personality patterns, which both stem from and produce further diminishing of growth. Each of these is a defense against feelings of threat, isolation, and helplessness. I find this simple schema useful in identifying the major ways we human beings block our growth in relationships. The first type of defense is that employed by the "moving toward" type persons(14) (comparable to Fromm's receptive type). Such individuals are compliant, dependent, and submissive. They seek to defend themselves against basic anxiety by seeking constant approval from others. Their fear of aggressiveness prevents them from satisfying their need for autonomy and assertiveness. They are pleasant, ingratiating, and easy to get along with as long as their exaggerated need for acceptance and love are met. They become very anxious when these needs are not met. Such persons tend to control others subtly by their "weak" submissiveness. In our sexist society, many women are conditioned to use the moving-toward defense.

The "moving against" type persons (comparable to Fromm's exploitative type) attempt to defend against anxiety by being hyper-independent, competitive, and aggressive, and by demanding power and prestige. They use others, including then-spouses and children, in status seeking and power games. They deny their underlying dependency needs. Our competitive society conditions many men to adopt this growth-inhibiting defense.

"Moving away" type persons are detached and aloof. They have great fear of intimacy and therefore must deny their need for the warmth of human contact. Such persons are essentially loners, who defend against anxiety by distancing. Often they are very conscientious in their work. Many are intellectualizers who keep distance from feelings -- their own and others -- by chronic :"head trips."

According to Horney, all three of these relational trends are present in everyone. But the relatively healthy person can move among the three flexibly as appropriate in different situations. In contrast, the severely growth-diminished person is frozen into one type of response in all situations. Most people have one trend that is stronger than the others. For example, when I feel threatened I most often use the moving-against defense (a favorite with many of us white, upward-striving males). But I also find myself using unproductive distancing and ingratiating compliance on other occasions.

Horney describes the dynamics of inner conflicts in a way that illuminates the nature of the growth work that many people need to do in therapy or in growth groups. She believed that in our conflicted society, inner conflicts are inescapable. In severely growth-diminished persons these conflicts paralyze creative living. Such persons are like soldiers under fire in a trench. They can live with some safety and even comfort as long as they stay within their defenses, but this position constricts their mobility and freedom severely. So-called neurotic persons seek to resolve conflicts between two sides of their needs (e.g., dependency and autonomy) by ignoring one side and exaggerating the other. Mary, a thirty-two-year-old secretary, adopted the moving-toward defense particularly in relating to men, denying her need for autonomy and assertiveness. But the exaggerated and unrelenting quality of her constant need for male reassurance and approval actually pushed men away. This deprived her of the approval and love that she was attempting to get. Her growth work in therapy focused on learning to recognize, value, and use her repressed assertiveness and to balance her need for love with greater autonomy.

As a practicing therapist, Horney was intimately acquainted with human destructiveness but rejected Freud's view that human beings are inherently destructive. Narcissism is not an inevitable or instinctual phenomenon but results from disturbed early relationships with authoritarian, rejecting, overambitious, or self-sacrificing parents.

If we want to injure and kill, we do so because we feel endangered, humiliated, abused; because we feel rejected and treated unjustly; because we are or feel interfered with in wishes which are of vital importance to us. That is, if we wish to destroy, it is in order to defend our safety or our happiness or what appears to us as such. Generally speaking, it is for the sake of life and not for the sake of destruction.(15)

Reflecting on her experiences as a therapist, Horney observed that the most powerful forms of anger and guilt that she had encountered were the anger and guilt of unlived life -- i.e., of diminished growth.

Horney criticized Freud for his lack of any clear vision of the constructive forces in human beings, his reduction of creativity and love to sublimated libido, and his misunderstanding of strivings toward self-realization as narcissism. Drawing on Albert Schweitzer's use of the terms "optimistic" and "pessimistic" (to mean "world and life affirmation" and "world and life negation") Horney described her own philosophy as follows: "With all its cognizance of the tragic element in neurosis, [it] is an optimistic one."(16)

In contrast to Freud's model of the therapist as detached and impersonal, Horney sees the therapist as a friendly, active person who shows personal concern and sympathy, liking, and respect for the patient. In this way the therapist helps the individual "retrieve his faith in others" (17) by discovering that his fears and hatreds are inappropriate with at least one person.

During Horney's adolescence, turn-of-the-century feminists were emphasizing education for women as a rallying point. With the support of her mother and several of her women friends, the resistance of Horney's father to her going to the gymnasium and on to medical school was overcome. She went on to become a pioneering foremother of contemporary feminist therapists. Three decades before the current writing by feminist therapists, she was publishing papers challenging the blatantly patriarchal presuppositions of Freud. Using the tools and many of the concepts of Freud, she identified his sexist blind spots and pointed to the need for a new psychology of women, understood from the viewpoint of women. She pointed out that Freud had drawn his theory of penis envy entirely from neurotic women and that he had ignored the fact that many men suffer from womb envy. She saw that women are a disadvantaged group in our society and that this cultural reality contributes significantly to their individual psychological problems. In examining the widespread distrust between the sexes, she showed how the patriarchal religion of the Old Testament provided justification for distrust of women and for male dominance. She rightly saw the distrust between men and women as being rooted in the unequal distribution of power between them: "At any given time, the more powerful side will create an ideology suitable to help maintain its position and to make this position more acceptable to the weaker one. . . .It is the function of such an ideology to deny or conceal the existence of a struggle."(18)

In her discussion of the problems of marriage, she shows that many of the difficulties that make good marriages so rare result from the unresolved conflicts people bring to marriage from the ways they are reared as boys and girls -- e.g., the unresolved dependency on mothers by the men and the anxiety and low self-esteem produced in women by being trained to respond as submissive and inferior to men.(19) She points to the actual physiological superiority possessed by women in their ability to carry, birth, and nurture new life, showing how many men are envious of this power. (20)

In my work as a pastoral counselor, I find many of Horney's concepts to be valuable for facilitating spiritual growth. She illuminates the dynamics of pathogenic, growth-stifling, guilt and fear-enhancing religion -- the type of beliefs, values, and religious practices that negate joy, freedom, and spiritual creativity. Many people are attracted to such rigid, authoritarian religious orientations because they seem to offer a defense against basic anxiety. Superego religion, which aims at controlling people (oneself and others) through guilt and fear of punishment, helps to create the paralyzing perfectionism of the ideal image. It helps keep people captive of what Homey calls the "tyranny of the oughts and shoulds."

In her early life Horney reacted against her father's stern, dogmatic religion. But she was a spiritual searcher even at seventeen. At that age she wrote a poem in her diary about her struggles to discover inner freedom, the purpose of her life, and knowledge of the All. Her daughter, Marianne Homey Eckardt, also a psychoanalyst, describes the poem in this way:

The poem begins with a restless longing for freedom, and an image of her digging herself out of an old masonry stronghold that a thousand years had built for her. The masonry gives way and buries her. But then her strength stirred, and as the poem continues, "an all-powerful longing. . .drove me forth to wander in order to see, to enjoy, and to know the All. And I wandered -- restlessly driven. . . . Released from the dungeon, I joyfully sing in jubilant tones the old song of life, to freedom, to light. But ever so often a question haunts me: What goal am I striving for? . .

. And I believe to hear the answer in the murmer of the woods: Rest exists only in the prison's walls. . . . Watchful searching, without complaining; restless striving, but no weary resignation: That is life. Dare to accept."(21)

This same free spirit characterized Horney throughout her life. Paul Tillich shared something of her spiritual journey in this last tribute to her:

Karen Horney became more and more aware that you cannot listen intensively to people who speak to you, that you cannot even listen to yourself if you do not listen to the voices through which the eternal speaks to us. It was not the voice of traditional religion to which she listened, it was the voices of people, the inner experiences, of nature, of poetry. And in the last year it was the voice from the eastern religion which grasped her heart and made her feel that the limits of an earthly existence are not the limits of our being, that we belong to two orders, although we can only see one of them with our senses. And it was an expression of her indomitable affirmation of life that she chose "reincarnation" as her symbol for the invisible order. More distinctly than in the earlier parts other life, she heard the sound of the eternal in these last years. But the power of the eternal was always working in her. For the manifestation of the eternal light and love worked in her and through her in all periods of her life. She knew the darkness of the human soul . . . but she believed that the soul can become a bearer of light. . . .She believed in the light and she had the power to give light to innumerable people. . . . Eternity works in time only if it works in love. And eternity worked love in her. . . . You can heal through insight only if insight is united with love. Therefore, many people who felt the light which radiated from her, from her insights and from her love, were healed in soul and body.(22)

Robert Coles, author and child psychiatrist at Harvard, met and had several conversations with Karen Horney when he was a medical student and she was hospitalized in New York City, a few days before her death. Homey knew she was dying. She asked how many women were in his medical school class, and he replied that there were only three out of a hundred students. She asked why that was the case, and they talked about the problems of combining marriage, motherhood, and training in medicine (which she had experienced personally), the resentment of women that many doctors have, and the irony that a profession dedicated to caring for people was so overwhelmingly composed of men. As he left her the last time, she was cordial and hopeful, thanking him for their talk. She spoke of the future: "You are young, and maybe when you reach my age the world will be quite different."(23)

Horney contributed in major ways to making psychoanalytic thought more growth-oriented. Yet, from the growth perspective, there are several limitations in her approach. Although she was keenly aware of the relational and societal roots of individual pathology and health, her therapeutic focus seemed to have remained intrapsychic and individualistic. She explored the intrapsychic factors that contribute to problems in marriages but did not emphasize equally crucial interpersonal dynamics that reinforce and perpetuate the intrapsychic patterns. As far as I know, she did not work directly with interpersonal systems (such as marriages or families) as such. Her awareness of the societal factors in personal problems apparently did not lead her to emphasize the importance of social and political action to change the pathogenic institutional context in which personal and relational problems proliferate. Although as an analyst she was radical for her times in her feminist views, she lacked the explicit emphasis of radical feminist therapists today on the therapeutic necessity of empowering people in therapy to change the social-political causes of their personal problems. Finally, although the spiritual awareness other thought increased, particularly in her latter years, the centrality of spiritual-value issues in all human growth was not emphasized explicitly in her therapeutic system.

Resources in the Therapy of Harry Stack Sullivan

Harry Stack Sullivan, founder of the interpersonal school of psychiatry, was born in upstate New York in 1892. During his lonely childhood on his parents' farm, his mother told him tales of their Irish past. One that fascinated him was that one of his ancestors was the West Wind, depicted as a

horse running toward the sunrise to meet the future.(24) Sullivan received his M.D. from Chicago Medical College in 1917. He received his psychiatric training with Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins and with William Alanson White at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. When Horney and Fromm immigrated to New York, Sullivan discovered that his thought had much in common with theirs. They all shared a strong interest in how cultures affect personal development. The three joined forces for several years. Eventually each developed a distinctive approach while retaining many similarities. Sullivan worked closely with anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and with Fromm and Horney as they together challenged classical psychoanalytic theory because of its inadequate instinctual and biological presuppositions. In 1923 Sullivan began teaching and doing research at the University of Maryland Medical School. In 1936 he became a founder of the Washington School of Psychiatry, out of which the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry in New York City grew. One of his passionate interests was the application of psychotherapeutic insights to the resolution of social problems. He was active in the formation of the World Federation of Mental Health. He died in 1949 while he was in Paris on a UNESCO project exploring the psychological roots of international conflict.

Sullivan was a kind of remote grandfather figure at the White Institute of Psychiatry when I trained there in the late forties. He still lectured occasionally, and my teachers there reflected the influence of his thought. As a result, his ideas had a considerable impact on the direction of my developing understanding of persons and of therapy. Sullivan was regarded as brilliant and eccentric. (He had five dogs that were in and out of his office most of the time.) Throughout his life he struggled with emotional difficulties and problems in relationships. Awareness of his own problems apparently increased his insight, empathy, and almost maternal compassion for deeply troubled persons. He was known for his remarkable effectiveness in treating young schizophrenics. It is indicative of the esteem in which Sullivan was held that his colleagues assembled his lectures and saw that they were published after his death.

As a therapeutic system-builder, Sullivan is second only to Freud. He was essentially a clinician who wrote for other therapists to communicate what he had learned about his primary concern -- how to help deeply troubled people. As I recall from his lectures, his language was very technical and his thought compressed and complicated. It was only when he was describing his work with particular patients that his communication style was dynamic and moving. Since the publication of his lectures (1953-56), appreciation of his contributions has increased. He is now recognized as having made significant contributions to field theory, sociology, and social psychology, as well as to the practice of psychotherapy.(25) His theories seek to show how particular cultures create the

warp and woof of personality within them. As a pioneer theoretician he was a foreparent of what eventually became relational and systems approaches to psychotherapy. His understanding of persons offered a fresh, innovative perspective when he introduced it. His primary focus was on blocked growth (pathology) in people he described as "inferior caricatures of what they might have been." But, from his clinical experience, he developed a theory of personality that provides resources which are useful for facilitating growth in people all along the continuum of wholeness.

The central motif of Sullivan's thought is his interpersonalism ùthe conviction that personality is essentially and inescapably interpersonal. All human experiences, even those which seem most solitary, are actually interpersonal in their essence. A man fishing alone in a boat, when he catches a big one, thinks immediately of whom he will tell or he fantasizes the response of persons to his success as a fisherman. Sullivan saw that what goes on within people is always intertwined with what goes on between them and others. Except on the most abstract level, the within and the between are inseparable. In Sullivan's view it is unproductive to try to define the psychological attributes of individuals (drives, impulses, and such) as though they existed in isolation. To do so simply reflects the inadequacies of our individualistic thought patterns and language. What we refer to as the psychology of individuals is actually a description of persons' patterns of interactions with others -- past, present, and future (in fantasy). The most effective way to understand or help people change is to approach them as selves-in-relationships. Constructive changes can best be facilitated in individuals by perceiving them in this interpersonal way.

When individuals come for counseling or therapy, it often is illuminating to see them through the interpersonal perspective. This perspective reminds one that persons are the organizing center of their interpersonal network; that who they are is an expression of the quality of their most significant relationships, past and present; that they still carry within them hurts from past relationships; that their present relational system sustains and reinforces their diminished growth; that their hurt will be healed only if they can establish more growthful relationships as they move into the future. As systems therapies emphasize more than did Sullivan, intrapsychic growth is best sustained by constructive interpersonal change.

As was true of Adler, Horney, Fromm, and Assagioli, Sullivan saw the self as having a central role in the organization of all behavior. The "self system," as Sullivan called it, develops out of the child's experiences of the reflected appraisals of need-fulfilling or need-depriving adults in early life. The self system plays a powerful role in enabling persons to meet the two sets of basic human needs -- the need for bodily satisfaction (food, sleep, sex, closeness to people) and interpersonal security (esteem, belongingness, acceptance, the power to meet one's needs). Self-esteem is derived both from the internalized appraisals of significant others in early life and from developing the power to satisfy one's basic needs. In working with persons suffering from damaged self-esteem, Sullivan's insights are particularly useful. Such persons still bear the burden of negative appraisals by adults in their early lives. Their feelings of self-worth will be enhanced both by experiencing and internalizing esteem from significant others (e.g., the therapist or growth group members) and from increasing their competence and power to meet their basic needs.

Sullivan, like Horney, uses anxiety as a key working concept. Anxiety is always an interpersonal phenomenon. Its essence is fear of disapproval. An infant absorbs parental values automatically and empathetically in order to reduce this painful fear. Anxiety is the force by which, for better or worse, the personality's basic contours are molded in early childhood. Children feel anxiety when they go against the culturally approved values as these are embodied in the values of their parents. Children learn to organize their behavior to meet their needs according to culture's values and thereby feel the security of a deeply felt sense of well-being and belonging. Sullivan's insights about anxiety, cultural values, and self-esteem are particularly useful in parent training and growth experiences. Most parents would like to rear children with constructive values and sturdy self-respect. It often helps them implement this desire to see how their children's esteem is deeply influenced by the evaluations they as parents communicate continually to them and how their children's values are determined, to a considerable degree, by the real values of themselves as parents.

Sullivan understood disordered behavior such as schizophrenia as a pattern of inappropriate and ineffective responses that aim at coping with an overload of anxiety. This is caused by confused and inconsistent relationships in which children cannot learn to avoid overwhelming anxiety.

Ineffectively coping with this overload of anxiety produces severely distorted perceiving, thinking, feeling, and relating.

Three patterns of self-referent responses ("personifications" of oneself) develop in children out of their relationships during infancy. Good-me feelings are learned in relationships where behavior produces satisfactions and security. Bad-me feelings are learned in anxiety-producing situations. The "good me" and "bad me" personifications belong to the self-system. Which one predominates most of the time depends on the need-satisfying quality of early relationships. Not-rne feelings result from experiences of "primitive anxiety," horror, and loathing, which is beyond verbal description. Not-rne feelings appear in images in nightmares and in schizophrenic episodes. (Sullivan saw "bad dreams" as constructive in that they discharge impulses that otherwise might be overwhelming.) Most of us have experienced the polarity of the good-me, bad-me feelings.

Sullivan's view of wholeness, like Freud's, was essentially developmental. His schema of the sequence of life stages defines them, however, by significant change in relationships rather than in terms of internal instinctual development. His six-stage approach complements and corrects the intrapsychic focus of Freud's developmental schema. Stage 1: Infancy extends from birth to the development of speech (a learning that alters interpersonal relationships profoundly). During this first period one absorbs good-me and bad-rne feelings empathically. Stage 2: Childhood extends to maturation of the need and capacity for peer playmates. Stage 3: Juvenile era extends to the maturation of the need and capacity for intimate relationships with one's age peers. The child goes to school and must learn to compete and cooperate with peers and to relate to 'authorities outside the family. Sullivan believed, as did Adler, Horney, and Fromm, that personality is not fixed in early childhood unless the self-system is so crippled by anxiety as to be largely out of touch with reality. Stage 4: Preadolescence is the same-sex chum period, which extends to maturation of genital sexuality. Stage 5: Adolescence: Early adolescence focuses on the initial patterning of behavior to satisfy sexual intimacy and security needs. Late adolescence extends to the establishment of an intimate love relationship in which the other person is nearly as important as oneself. Stage 6: Adulthood: This is the goal of the developmental process by which one becomes, in this stage, a participant in the adult culture. Sullivan describes the healthy adult who has successfully finished the growth stages through adolescence in almost euphoric terms:

The person comes forth with self-respect adequate to almost any situation, with the respect for others that this competent self-respect entails, with the dignity that benefits the high achievement of competent personality, and with the freedom of personal initiative that represents a comfortable adaptation of one's personal situation to the circumstances that characterize the social order of which one is a part.(26)

Sullivan's descriptions of growth from the interpersonal perspective can provide valuable insights for anyone interested in facilitating optimal development in children and youth. (27)

A serious deficiency in Sullivan's developmental schema is his lack of awareness of the possibilities of continuing to develop throughout the adult stages of life. Like Freud, Sullivan made the fallacious assumption that the die is cast at the end of adolescence and that only intense psychotherapy can effect significant changes.

There was a winsome humanity about Sullivan that emphasized the essential humanness of all persons, including the most disturbed. In discussing the mentally ill, he wrote, "We are all much more human than anything else."(28) His view of the therapist is that of a "participant observer." To facilitate growth one must be there, participating as a full human being in the therapeutic relationship. But one must also be an observer who can see what ordinarily is missed and thus help bring clearer understanding of what is occurring in the person and in the relationship. The therapist must function and communicate on these two levels simultaneously.

Sullivan's trust in the healing-growth elan is clear in this comment about therapy: "If we clear away the obstacles (to effective relationships) everything else will take care of itself. I have never found myself called upon to 'cure' anyone."(29) Apparently Sullivan's awareness of his own inner problems served to prevent him from taking a condescending attitude toward patients. His basic therapeutic attitude seemed to be: "Despite my inescapable emotional difficulties and personality warps, I will work with troubled people to help them achieve better relationships and more inner strength. Hopefully both of us will learn and grow in the process."(30)

Sullivan's commitment to using psychological and psychiatric understanding to help resolve social problems is one of his significant contributions to a growth-oriented "persons- in- relationships- in-society" approach. He lived only a few years into the atomic age, but he had a vivid concern about our new fearsome capacity to end all human history. He worked with a kind of missionary zeal to rally the mental health community behind the work of UNESCO and the World Health Organization. His essay entitled "Remobilizing for Enduring Peace and Social Progress"(31) communicates his sense of the urgency of the task and his conviction that the social sciences and psychotherapy offer important resources that may help us survive and develop a new age for humankind. Sullivan saw persons in the psychological and psychotherapeutic professions as among the builders of the future.

There are several limitations in Sullivan's thought when viewed from the growth perspective. Although he was aware of the positive potentials that are wasted in disturbed people, he did not have a thoroughgoing, explicit growth orientation in his understanding of therapy. His theories, derived mainly from severely disturbed people, have "the odor of the clinic." Although his theory of personality was profoundly inter- personal, he apparently did not move beyond focusing on one individual at a time in therapy. He had a dawning vision that eventually led other therapists who shared it to treat interpersonal systems directly. But he did not take this giant therapeutic step himself. Sullivan tended to overgeneralize on some of his theories, reducing complex human responses to oversimplified explanation. For example, he sees anxiety as derived entirely

from the fear of disapproval. Though this is a major source of anxiety, it is only one of several sources. To my knowledge, Sullivan had no interest in facilitating positive spiritual growth. In spite of these weaknesses, Sullivan's system provides valuable insights on which growth-centered counselors and therapists can build. To his credit he was a therapist who sought to be a builder of the future.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in Fromm's Therapy

Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1941. Explores the reasons that freedom is so threatening, and the escapes into conformity and authoritarianism.

---Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1947. A discussion of the possibilities and problems of a psychoanalytically based humanistic ethic.  

---Psychoanalysis and Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. He sets forth his views on the universal human need for religion, Freud's and Jung's views of religion, and the psychoanalyst as physician of the soul.

---The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1955. Examines the pathology of normalcy in our society and the creation of a society in which human needs will be fulfilled.

---The Art of Loving. New York: Harper, 1956. A popular discussion of the nature and practice of life in a society in which love has disintegrated.

---The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. A depth exploration of the major theories of human destructiveness and a presentation of Fromm's conceptions of the various types of aggression.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in the Therapy of Karen Horney

Horney, Karen. Our Inner Conflicts, A Constructive Theory of Neurosis. New York: W. W.

Norton, 1945. An exposition of her major theories, including the three defensive ways of relating and the idealized image.

---Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W. W. Norton, 1950. A restatement and refinement of her earlier works, emphasizing the motif of human growth.

---Feminine Psychology. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. A collection of Horney's pioneering papers on the psychology of women and our sexist society.

Kelman, Harold. Helping People: Karen Horney's Psychoanalytic Approach. New York: Science House, 1971. A systematic presentation of Horney's therapeutic concepts and methods; begins

with two biographical chapters.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources from Sullivan's Therapy

Chapman, A. H. Harry Stack Sullivan, His Life and His Work. New York: Putnam's, 1976. Includes a biography and chapters on Sullivan's views on personality development and psychotherapy, and the relevance of Sullivan to current social dilemmas.

Mullahy, Patrick, ed. The Contributions of Harry Slack Sullivan. New York: Science House, 1967. A symposium on interpersonal theory in social science and psychiatry, including papers by Clara Thompson and Gardner Murphy.

Sullivan, Harry Stack. Collected Works, 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.

---The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W. W, Norton, 1953. Sullivan's description of the developmental epochs.

---The Psychiatric Interview. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954. Describes the structuring and process of psychiatric interviews.

---Schizophrenia as a Human Process. New York: W. 'W. Norton, 1965. Sullivan's insightful exploration of schizophrenia.

NOTES

1. See Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1941), pp. 103-35; 207-39.

2. Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 25-26.

3. Ibid., pp. 50-51.

4. Written with D. T. Suzuki and Richard de Martino (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

5. Man for Himself (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1947), p. 250.

6. Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 31.

7. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p. 290.

8. Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1955), p. 284.

9. Ralph Hyatt, "Karen Horney, A Tribute," Journal of Marriage and Family Counseling, October, 1977, p. 39.

10. Tillich, "Karen Horney, A Funeral Address," Pastoral Psychology, May, 1953, p. 12.

11. Neurosis and Human Growth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 17.

12. Ibid., p. 15.

13. Horney, Our Inner Conflicts (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), p. 41.

14. For a fuller discussion of these three defensive modes, see ibid., chaps. 3, 4, and 5.

15. Gerald Sykes, The Hidden Remnant (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 100.

16. Neurosis and Human Growth, pp. 377-79.

17. Our Inner Conflicts, p. 45.

18. Feminine Psychology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 116.

19. Ibid., p. 126.

20. Ibid., p. 60.

21. "Horney's Daughter Shares Mother's Early Diaries." William A. White Institute Newsletter, Fall 1975. p. 12.

22. Tillich, "Karen Homey, A Funeral Address," pp. 12-13.

23. Robert Coles. "Karen Horney's Flight from Orthodoxy." in Women and Analysis, Jean Stouse, ed. (New York: Grossman, 1974), p. 189.

24. Ralph M. Crowley, "Harry Stack Sullivan: The Man," William A. White Institute Newsletter, Fall 1970, p. 2.

25. See Mullahy. The Contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan (New York: Science House, 1967), chaps. 5, 6, 7.

27. For a fuller discussion of the life eras see Patrick Mullahy. Oedipus, Myth and Complex, A Review of Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Grove Press, 1948), pp. 301-11; and A. H. Chapman, Harry Stack Sullivan, His Life and His Work (New York: Putnam's, 1976), chaps. 4 and 5.

28. Donald H. Ford and Hugh B. Urban, Systems of Psychotherapy (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 521.

29. The Psychiatric Interview (New York: W. W. Norton. 1954), p. 242.

30. Chapman, Harry Stack Sullivan, p. 17.

31. This paper is in The Fusion of Psychiatry and Social Sciences, Collected Works, II (New York: W. W. Norton. 1965), 273-89.

Alfred Adler was born in a suburb of Vienna in 1870. He trained in medicine at the University of Vienna and practiced general medicine for a while. His relationship with Freud began in 1902, when he wrote a defense of Freud's book on dreams after it had been ridiculed in the press.(1) Freud invited him to join a small psychoanalytic discussion group that met at his home each week. From the beginning the two had disagreements over dream analysis and the role of early sexual trauma in mental illness. In 1911, after a series of disagreements, Adler left Freud's circle, taking nine of the group's twenty-three members with him. A year prior to this split, Adler gave up general medicine to practice psychiatry full time. Within a year after the split he named his theories "Individual Psychology" to emphasize the distinctiveness of each individual's experience and growth.

After World War I, Adler set up the first child-guidance clinic in cooperation with the Vienna school system. Adler was fun-loving and affable, enjoyed good food, companionship, and music, particularly opera. He abhorred technical jargon. He believed in the application of insights from therapy to the everyday life of people and spent much of his professional time writing and lecturing to nonprofessional persons. In 1935 he left Vienna because of the fascist wave that was sweeping over Europe. He settled in New York, where he practiced psychiatry and taught medical psychology at the Long Island College of Medicine. He died in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1937 while on a lecture tour.

Adler believed that human beings possess remarkable positive potentials and the ability to mold their heredity and their environment intentionally and creatively. His system offers much to growth-oriented counselors, therapists, and teachers. It is noteworthy that Abraham Maslow includes Adler among the pioneers of the "third force," the human potentials approach to psychology.

In contrast to Freud, Adler saw human beings as essentially creative (rather than impulse driven and destructive). He emphasized the active, integrating self (rather than the frail, victimized ego); held to a "soft" (rather than a "hard") determinism; had a strong interest in future, goal-directed strivings (rather than origins); emphasized the organism as a whole centered in the self (rather than a conflict view of personality); regarded the striving for worth and power (rather than sexual striving) as the central dynamic in mental health and illness; emphasized the possibilities for continuing change in the later years (rather than regarding the early years as utterly decisive) (2) It is clear from these motifs in Adler's thought that his vision of human beings was positive and growth-centered.

Adler believed that everyone has a will-to-power as a result of the early experience of being a helpless infant surrounded by powerful adults. He declared: "Just to be human is to feel inferior." (3) In the struggle to master one's environment, issues of worth and power become central. A great variety of compensatory devices -- healthy and unhealthy -- are developed by persons in their struggles to overcome feelings of powerlessness and inferiority. In facilitating growth work in counseling and therapy there is something reassuring, even liberating, about Adler's view that everyone suffers, to some degree, from inferiority feelings. This awareness can help free persons from the fallacious assumption that most other people have no self-esteem problems, while they themselves suffer from feelings of low self-worth.

Early in life each individual, according to Adler, learns a particular life-style -- a structured pattern of behaving and responding, the aim of which is to maintain the minimal self-esteem and feelings of power that everyone must have to cope with life. The life-style of persons is the key to understanding all their behavior -- dreams, attitudes, actions, perceptions, memories, fantasies, feelings, and so on. Behind one's life-style is one's life goal. Adlerian therapy aims at identifying the malfunctioning life goal, reeducating the person toward a new, more constructive goal, and thus making the life-style more constructive. Adler's emphasis on the functioning of the person-as-a whole is a valuable perspective in counseling and therapy. Watching for patterns in counselees' ways of feeling, perceiving, behaving, and relating to others often allows one to identify the pattern by which persons are sabotaging their own lives.

Adler believed that all human beings have and need to develop the germ of the capacity for loving, cooperative relationships. (This contrasts sharply with Freud's view that individual strivings are essentially selfish and antisocial and that all adjustments to society are concessions by the instincts to the demands of social reality.) All people have a striving for superiority, to overcome ubiquitous feelings of inferiority, but they also have a deep need for human togetherness and cooperation. Adler called this need Gemeinschaft-geflihl, usually translated "social feeling" or "social interest." The German word expresses a passionate need for relationships of closeness,

mutual caring, and active social concern. (This concept is close to what I have described as the will-to-relate, which is the fundamental human drive since it is only in relationships that people can satisfy most of their basic psychological needs.)

In Adler's understanding, the healthy means to compensate for feelings of inferiority and satisfy the human need for power and esteem are ways that include the welfare of others. Adler stated: "Finding an avenue through which he can struggle toward objectives of social as well as personal advantage is the soundest 'compensation' for all the natural weaknesses of individual human beings."(4) Social interest first appears in the early interaction with the mother. It grows as a person matures. Neurosis occurs when, because of defects in parental attitudes (pampering or rejection) or physical defects, a child's social interest is distorted or stunted. In such persons, the striving for superiority becomes grandiose. They try to satisfy their need for power at the expense of others and in ways that isolate them from others. Adler called this an erroneous solution"(5) to feelings of inferiority. Self-centeredness, aggressions, and sadism are not inherent in human nature; they are learned responses to unfortunate early-life experiences that produce a maladaptive life goal and life-style.

Adler's emphasis on the human need for feelings of worth and power is very useful in facilitating growth work. Feelings of powerlessness and low self-worth are present in nearly everyone who seeks therapeutic help, though often these feelings are well hidden behind their defensive "pride." As trust develops in therapeutic relationships, people usually begin to relax their defenses, revealing their underlying feelings of self-rejection. The chronic, mutually damaging power struggles that bring people for marriage counseling almost always stem from hidden feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem in both persons. Only as they can learn new ways to satisfy

their legitimate need for power and worth in ways that support rather than stymie the other's feelings of power and worth will the destructive cycles be replaced by more mutually satisfying marital relating. To do this they must discover how to use power with and for (the other and themselves) rather than over or against. More often than not, the presenting problems that bring a couple with a dysfunctional marriage to counseling -- money, sex, child-rearing conflicts, and so on -- are power struggles stemming from underlying feelings of impotence and self-deprecation.

The awareness that compensation for handicaps, losses, and feelings of inferiority can be constructive is a potentially growth-enabling insight. Enabling troubled people to "own" their feelings of inadequacy and then use them as a challenge to develop personally and socially useful compensation is a healthy way to help them transform minuses into partial pluses.

One of Adler's significant contributions was his illumination of growthful ways to parent children. He recognized that the general attitudes and feelings of parents and the relationships among the siblings determine the growth climate of a family. He helped parents see that discipline and training should have a positive, not a repressive character. Through his lectures, books, and work in child guidance centers, he encouraged parents to nurture their children's budding social interest, self-confidence, responsibility, and concern for others. A close collaborator of Adler in the child-guidance clinic movement in Vienna was child psychiatrist Rudolf Dreikurs. Later he became director of the Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago. Through his writings (see Children: The Challenge), he has made Adler's approach to children readily available to parents.

Ader anticipated by several decades some of the key insights of feminist psychologists and therapists He saw that our male-dominated society saddles women generally with an additional burden of inferiority by treating them as inferior. To compensate for this, some women adopt what Adler called a "masculine protest," rejecting their special strengths as women and joining the male success rat race in an effort to feel worthwhile. Adler held that compulsive goal-striving (on the part of both women and men) is directly related to the polarization of the sexes. It was clear to Adler that rigid sex-role stereotyping is a way of keeping women in a less powerful place in relationships and in society. Forcing human beings into narrow, rigid categories impoverishes

self-actualization for both women and men.(6)

Adler's belief that inappropriate power strivings are involved impersonal, relationship, and institutional problems makes him an ideological foreparent of what eventually became radical

therapy. His concept of social interest carried him into the arena of concern for social and institutional change. Adlerian Heinz Ansbacher declares:

With his concern for social justice, Adler worked actively to change oppressive institutional practices and structures, particularly in education and through the creation of a network of child-guidance clinics. He was an ardent socialist. His Russian wife was a friend of Trotsky, who visited their home frequently. Adler is a refreshing example of a therapist who refused to focus exclusively on intrapsychic factors, ignoring the relational and societal context that mold intrapsychic development.

I find many of Adler's major insights useful for understanding pathogenic religion and for facilitating spiritual growth.(8) To illustrate, Carl, a young adult in a growth-oriented therapy group, struggled to resist the nostalgic attraction that he felt for the rigid, authoritarian, but comfortable religion of his childhood. Although he no longer found most of this belief system intellectually acceptable, he still felt pulled back toward it emotionally. In the group, he gradually became aware of the crippling impact that his old religion had had on his spiritual life. He discovered the ways in which the old beliefs had given him a sense of undeserved and derivative (from God) worth and power to compensate temporarily and ineffectively for his personal feelings of unworthiness and powerlessness. As he grew he gradually claimed more of his own real strengths and developed more of his competencies. As his awareness of his inner power and value increased, his spiritual life also changed. He reported feeling more in touch with people and with a Spirit who affirmed him as a valuable person.

The break between Freud and Adler was unfortunate for both sides. Each tended to ignore important dimensions of the truth about people and therapy that the other had discovered, while overemphasizing and overgeneralizing his own insights. Much of Adler's approach seems to have developed as an antithesis to Freud's. He rejected Freud's valuable findings regarding infantile sexuality and the unconscious. He rejected the very concept of inner conflicts, seeing all conflict as being between environmental forces and inner strivings for superiority. All this impoverished his understanding of the complexities of the human situation. His refusal to admit that the house of the human psyche is often divided against itself resulted in intellectual contortions, particularly when he tried to give a cogent explanation of the dynamics of psychosis. His important emphasis on the growth- oriented, freely responding side of human beings often seems like superficial optimism because it is not balanced by awareness of the dark, trapped, destructive forces on which Freud had concentrated his attention. Freud likened the ego, as described by Adler, to "the clown who claims to have himself accomplished all the difficult feats of the circus."(9) Adler is a vivid illustration of the need for any viable growth approach to have a depth dimension that includes a robust awareness of the powerful resistances to change and growth within persons. In spite of these serious limitations, Adler is a significant foreparent of contemporary growth-oriented therapies who contributed valuable insights that deserve to be rediscovered by teachers, parents, counselors, and therapists.

Growth Resources from Otto Rank

Otto Rank was born in 1884 in Vienna, the son of an emotionally absent, alcoholic father and a gentle, responsible mother. When he first encountered Freud's writings in 1904 his response was as if he had had a religious revelation. He said, "Now I see everything clearly. The world process _ no longer a riddle."(10) Rank was a brilliant engineering student when, in 1905, he first met Freud. His creativity, talents, and enthusiasm impressed Freud greatly. Rank became one of his closest associates for nearly twenty years, apparently forming a strong but ambivalent transference relationship with Freud, as a substitute father figure. Rank became an outstanding lay (non-medically trained) analyst. In 1921 Freud hailed him as the greatest living analyst.

In 1924 Rank published The Trauma of Birth, which made birth (a mother-centered event) rather than the Oedipus complex (a father-centered experience in Freud's thought) the key to anxiety. The book was dedicated to Freud, but its main point constituted a devastating attack on Freud's thought. With an intense interest in mythology, art, and literature, Rank came to reject Freud's biological reductionist understanding of human personality. He found classical psychoanalytic theory therapeutically inadequate, so he began to experiment with more active and briefer methods. He called his approach "psychotherapy" and eventually "will therapy" rather than "psychoanalysis." He came to understand neurosis as a philosophical and moral problem rather than as a medical problem. The troubled person needs a new Weltan-schauung, a new world view. The unorthodox development in his concepts and methods eventually led, when Rank was forty, to a painful break with Freud. Beginning in 1926, Rank lived in Paris. He commuted frequently to the United States for lecturing until he moved to New York in 1935. He died of an infection in 1939 a month after Freud's death. The timing of his death was probably not a coincidence.

Rank's views had, as Ruth Monroe makes clear, "profound influence on the development of psychiatric social work, psychotherapy, counseling, education and other non-medical fields in which deep psychological insight is required."(11) Rank anticipated thrusts that eventually became central in client- centered therapy, reality therapy, and assertiveness training. In a sense he was a foreparent of the whole growth trend in contemporary psychotherapies. I feel drawn to Rank by his dynamic concern for human potentializing, his emphasis on intentionality, and his awareness of the strong, healthy side that is in persons generally, even the most disturbed.

There are rich resources in Rank for use by growth-oriented teachers, counselors, and therapists. Like Adler, he emphasized the healthy dimensions of personality. His understanding of persons was essentially hopeful. He highlighted human freedom and potentials. With Adler, Jung, and Homey, he understood the self holistically. According to Rank, there is in all persons a positive striving toward wholeness, which he called the "will-to-health."(12) Rejecting Freud's determinism, Rank, like Assagioli (the creator of psychosynthesis), regarded will as the very core of human personality. Rank wrote, "I understand by will a positive guiding organization and integration of the self which utilizes creativity as well as inhibits and controls the instinctual drives."(13) As the creative expression of the total personality, the will distinguishes each person as unique from all others.

The neurotic suffers mainly from an inability to function as an integrated, asserting, purposeful self. The goal of therapy (and personal growth in general) is to activate and strengthen the will so that people learn to live intentionally. Effective therapy puts us in the driver's seat of our own life!

In reflecting on the power of the will as it relates to the concept of the unconscious, Rank observed: "It is astonishing how much the patient knows and how little is unconscious if one does not give him this convenient excuse for refusing responsibility."(14)

Rank describes a variety of ways in which human beings evade responsibility. In animism, responsibility is avoided by projecting human will onto the physical world, peopling nature with spirits. Theists escape responsibility by projecting a part of their will onto an all-powerful deity to whom they must submit. Similarly, scientists introduce determinism into their understanding of persons, to escape from affirming the responsible will. Thus animism, religion, and science can all be used to evade the responsible exercise of will. According to Rank, many people use psychoanalysis, focusing on explaining behavior by probing the past, to avoid living responsibly in the present. In a viewpoint that anticipates by several decades a similar emphasis in Fritz Peris, Rank points out that explanations are about as helpful in psychotherapy as in appendicitis.

Will, in Rank's understanding, is ambivalent from the beginning. Birth, the loss of a perfect union between mother and child, is the basic source and prototype of all subsequent anxiety. All anxiety is separation anxiety. The trauma of birth is more than being ejected from the pleasure and safety of the intrauterine garden of Eden; it is the feeling of no longer being whole in oneself. But birth is also the prototype of all experiences of rebirth, of dying to the safety and integration of one life stage or experience to be reborn into the next. The will motivates persons to strive toward autonomy and independence, but this is in conflict with their "life fear," the fear of independence and nonunion. The fundamental human polarity is between separation and union, between the risk of moving into the future to become one's potential self and the risk of returning to the womb of the past and of conformity. Constructive living involves satisfying the need for both separation and union. Positive will has the capacity to integrate these two dichotomous needs. Rank uses the term "artist" to describe the person who achieves creative integration of these two poles.  

Most people, according to Rank, achieve a dull quieting of this basic conflict by conforming and thus renouncing their striving toward creative autonomy. Rigid conformists may function satisfactorily in a stable society but in a period of lightning-fast social change (like ours), their security and their virtues may evaporate almost overnight. Neurotics cannot conform like most people, nor can they move ahead purposefully. Rankian therapy aims at helping people overcome their womb-returning tendencies through strengthening their wills by actively exercising them (as in assertiveness training). Psychotherapy focuses, as it does in Adlerian and gestalt therapy, mainly on the present. The problems that bring people to therapy have to do with their inability to deal intentionally with the present. Too much involvement with either the past or the future can be used to avoid responsibility in the present.

The therapist is seen as a warm human being whose task is to accept and affirm the wills of persons until they can develop strength in exercising their own wills. The therapist seeks to create a permissive atmosphere within which persons have the space to exercise and strengthen their own wills. The responsibility of changing themselves into self-directing persons must stay with them. If persons are to grow, the therapist must resist their efforts to project responsibility by saying, in effect, "I am weak, confused, helpless. Tell me what to do or do it for me." To yield to this request is to reinforce their basic problem. The will is only strengthened as it is exercised! Therapy is seen as a microcosm of life. Therapists must stay flexible and in tune with the struggles and creativity of their clients, but also they must be willing to engage clients in a confrontation of wills that can strengthen the clients wills. There is an egalitarian thrust in Rank's view of the therapist-patient relationship. "The therapeutic experience is characterized by the fact that both

patient and therapist are at once creator and creature. The patient may not be only creature, he must also become creator; while the therapist plays not only the creator role, but at the same time must serve the creative will of the patient as material."(15) There is in Rank a deep respect for the personality of the disturbed person, conflicts and all. Their conflicts, as expressions of will, are affirmed. Therapy does not eliminate all conflicts but rather enables persons to live creatively and intentionally with the conflicts that are a part of everyone's experience.

The central Rankian theme -- the primacy and ambivalence of the will -- is relevant and useful in both educational and therapeutic growth work. All of us have experienced the powerful conflicts between the striving toward becoming the unique, authentic selves we potentially are and the pull

toward safe, comfortable belonging and conformity. We all know the "life fear," the anxiety about nonconformity and assertiveness. The dependence-autonomy conflict often is strongest during

adolescence, but it continues in different expressions throughout all the life stages. The seductive pull of the past is powerful, particularly during times of insecurity. There are many "wombs" around, inviting comfortable escape from growth. The search in many marriages today (including my own) for a mutually acceptable balance between autonomy and growth, on the one hand, and relational growth and closeness, on the other, is a variation on the same theme. How can couples maintain a creative relationship within which the needs of each of us for distance, autonomy, and personal growth are balanced with our need for intimacy? The key to transcending the dependence-independence polarity is creative interdependency.

Rank's central working concept, separation anxiety, is very useful in coping with grief. As the French proverb put it, "Every parting is a little death." All growth work also includes grief work. Each new stage of our growth requires leaving the security of the past stage, within which we have learned to cope with some comfort and competence. Rank emphasized rebirth as the key to growth in loss experiences. Thus, growth becomes a series of deaths and rebirths.

One practical application of the concept of separation anxiety is Rank's discovery that end-setting, early in therapy, allows people the opportunity of dealing, in the therapeutic relationship, with their ambivalence about separation and union, dependence and autonomy. Setting a tentative time for terminating a counseling or therapy relationship has a variety of growth-enabling effects, in my experience. It tends to diminish dependency and encourage development of clients' own strengths and will by reminding them that the counselor-therapist is available only for a limited time. Awareness of the ending, even if it is still several weeks or months off, tends to motivate more responsible growth work by clients. As the agreed-upon termination approaches it is not unusual for clients to become aware of unfinished grief work associated with previous losses. The ambivalence toward being in therapy -- wanting the security and dependency of the relationship and yet wanting to be free and autonomous -- is resolved growthfully when it is confronted and resolved in favor of purposeful autonomy. Tentative termination dates can always be renegotiated, of course, if it becomes evident that further therapeutic work is essential for the person's growth.

One of the strengths in Rank's thought was his view that human beings are inherently social. Of the inner world and the outer world of relationships, he wrote: "The harmonious balancing of the two spheres needs to be the presupposition of therapy so that both spheres are worked upon simultaneously. Both worlds are real or unreal. What we seek in the outer world is what we have found in the inner." (16)

Rank criticized Freud's patriarchal assumptions and his view of women as derivative from and inferior to men. By making the mother-child relationship the key to human development and therefore to the psychic life of persons, Rank moved away from Freud's father-centered psychology of persons. In his description of the psychological differences in men and women he observed that men have sought their strength in creating and in controlling by their masculine ideology and by their wills. Rank believed that women find power and a kind of immortality in motherhood. Many men, he held, have not accepted their mortality and therefore have never really accepted themselves. Because women have accepted patriarchal ideology, they need constant reassurance that they are acceptable to men and are living up to their ideals. Women conceal much of their psychology both because they need it as a weapon against the male world, which dominates them, and as a refuge for their injured self. (17) a discussion of the meaning of equality between women and men, Rank declared that the only real equality is "the equal right of each individual to become and to be himself, which actually means to accept his own difference and have it accepted by others."(18)

The main thrusts of Rank's theory are particularly useful when counseling with persons caught in severe independence-conformity conflicts (such as some adolescents) those who are paralyzed about finishing a project or chapter of their lives (e.g, pre-graduation anxiety attacks) and in danger of sabotaging the successful completion of something they really value; those who are afraid to make decisions or try something new which they want but which may mean giving up old securities; couples who are struggling to find satisfying closeness without either of them losing their identity and autonomy heir lives (e.g., pre-graduation anxiety attacks) and in danger of sabotaging the successful completion of something they really value; those who are afraid to make decisions or try something new which they want but which may mean giving up old securities; couples who are struggling to find satisfying closeness without either of them losing their identity and autonomy.

For counselors and therapists interested in facilitating spiritual growth, Rank offers a variety of resources. His writings deal extensively with the psychology of religion. His insights about how religion can be used to foster conformity and avoid personal responsibility can help identify pathogenic, growth-blocked religious beliefs and systems. There is a constant temptation to use religion as a comfortable womb rather than a stimulus to rebirth. Dependency-creating ministers, childish belief systems, and exclusivistic conceptions of religious truth ("My way is the truth") can all function as seductive, growth-inhibiting wombs.

The death-rebirth theme in Rank has obvious affinities with the dying-resurrection motif in the New Testament. In working with persons going through the deep waters of painful mid-years crises, it is often growth-enabling to help them face the fact that the values and priorities by which they have been living are no longer viable. Their old philosophy of life will not provide creative guidelines for the second half of their lives. A rebirth is urgently needed. Such an awareness can lead to a painful but freeing revision of their guiding values. Religion is growth-enabling only if it encourages continuing rebirth to new dimensions of oneself, one's relationships, and one's experience of nature and of spiritual reality.

Although I resonate to Rank's positive emphasis on human strengths and potentialities, the depth dimension found in Freud and Jung is underemphasized in his thought. In spite of his interest in myth and art and his exploration of the psychic life in some depth (for example, in The Myth Birth of the Hero) seems be little awareness of the "demonic" or the "shadow side" in personality. The important resources of his approach, to be used most growthfully, must be integrated with complementary resources from the depth therapies.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in the Therapy of Alfred Adler

Adler, Alfred. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, ed. L. Heinz and R. R. Ansbacher. New York: Harper, 1956. Two persons who studied with Adler did what he himself was unable to do — systematically organized his thoughts on critical issues. The book consists of direct quotes from Adler, with comments by the Ansbachers interspersed.

Dreikurs, Rudolf. Children: The Challenge. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1964. Presents a practical application of Adler's insights and approach to creative parenthood.

Fadiman, James, and Frager, Robert. "Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology," Personality and Personal Growth. New York: Harper, 1976, pp. 92-110. succinct overview of Adler's major concepts and his understanding of human growth.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in the Therapy of Otto Rank

Rank, Otto. The Trauma of Birth. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. Rank discusses birth both as the origin and prototype of the fundamental dependence-autonomy struggle.

---l Therapy, and Truth and Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. A description of Rankian therapy.

Notes

1. The biographical data were drawn mainly from Elizabeth Hall, "Alfred Adler, A Sketch," Psychology Today, February, 1970, pp. 45, 67.  

2. This list comparing Adler's and Freud's position is from Heinz Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher, eds., The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 4-6.

3. Ibid p. 115.

4. Ibid., p. 154.

5. Ibid., p. 250.

6. Ibid., p. 248.

7. Heinz Ansbacher, "Alfred Adler, Individual Psychology," reprinted from Psychology Today magazine, February, 1970, p. 66. Copyright, 1970 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

8. Adler's views on the psychology of religion are set forth in the book edited by the Ansbachers, pp. 460 ff.

9. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. II (New York: Basic Books, 1955), p. 131.

10. Franz Alexander, et al., eds., Psychoanalytic Pioneers (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 38.

11. Ruth Monroe, Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought (New York: The Dryden Press, 1955), p. 576.

12. Rank, Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), p. 17.

13, Ibid., pp. 111-12.

14. Ibid., p. 24.

15. Ibid., p. 89.

16. Ibid., pp. 196-97.

17. See Patrick Mullahy, Oedipus, Myth and Complex (New York: Grove Press, 1948), p. 198.

18. Beyond Psychology (New York: Dover Publications, 1941), p. 267.

For a variety of reasons, it is important for growth-oriented counselors, therapists, and teachers to know the traditional psychoanalytic therapies well. Although their central focus is on psycho-pathology and its treatment, many of the traditional therapies have growth thrusts that provide

valuable conceptual tools. Some of the insights from these therapies can correct and complement the understandings of persons and their growth presented in more recent therapies. Knowledge of the historical roots of most contemporary therapies (in the psychoanalytic tradition) can help growth-enablers to evaluate and use the current therapies more critically and growthfully.

The growth contributions of the traditional therapies are, for the most part, concentrated in two areas -- their illumination of the depths and complexity of human personality, and their insights about the nature and dynamics of deeply blocked growth (pathology). These insights are invaluable particularly when one is working with persons whose growth has been diminished deeply for many years. In my experience, the traditional therapies provide many valuable working concepts but relatively few growth methods that are as effective as those in some of the more recent therapies. In the first four chapters I will highlight the conceptual tools from traditional therapies that I have found useful for facilitating growth in the lives of those with whom I have worked as coun-selor, therapist, growth-group facilitator, and teacher.

Generic Growth Resources from Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, a small town in what is now Czechoslovakia, May 6, 1856. When he was four. the Freud family moved to Vienna, where he lived until one year before his death. When he entered the University of Vienna, he chose to study medicine, mainly because he was moved by a deep curiosity about human beings, a curiosity that had been stimulated by reading Darwin and Goethe.(1) Throughout his life. his consuming professional interest was his search for greater understanding of the depths of the human psyche.

Following medical school, Freud did research in physiology for a while. He entered private practice reluctantly, in order to have enough income to allow him to marry. He worked as a surgeon and then in general medicine before taking a course in psychiatry. A travel grant allowed him to study in Paris with Jean Martin Charcot, who was using hypnotic suggestion to treat hysterical symptoms. Following this he explored the dynamics of hysteria in more depth, working with an older physician, Joseph Breuer.

Freud first used the term "psycho-analysis" to describe his methodology in 1896. His first and probably his most significant book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was based to a considerable extent on the self-analysis of his own dreams. When it was published in 1900, it was almost ignored by the medical community. But a group of young physicians were attracted to Freud's ideas and they began to meet weekly at his home to discuss them. This circle, which eventually included Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, and others, established a professional society and began to publish a journal, thus launching the psychoanalytic movement. The influence of Freud's ideas gradually expanded. In 1910 he came to the United States, accompanied by key members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, to lecture at Clark University.

Freud's consuming passion was to develop a system for understanding human beings that would live after him and would eventually reorient all of psychiatry. He spent his professional life doing psychoanalysis with patients, developing his theories (which he continued to change throughout his life) and writing voluminously. Freud's ideas drew intense criticism from the medical and scientific communities of his day. He rigidly tried to control the direction of developments within the movement and rejected most of those who radically challenged his views. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, Freud was allowed to move to London, where he died the next year, after a long, painful struggle with cancer of the mouth. He continued to do analytic work until less than two months before his death. He refused to take pain-deadening drugs, except occasional aspirin, preferring "to think in torment to not being able to think clearly."

My training in psychotherapy was strongly influenced by psychoanalytic concepts and methods. Although I have become increasingly aware of the limitations of these methods for facilitating growth and of the gaps and inaccuracies in Freud's vast conceptual system, I retain a profound appreciation for the way his pioneering discoveries illuminate the depths and darkness of the human psyche. All of us who practice the healing-growthing arts owe a tremendous debt to this brilliant adventurer into the unconscious, this courageous explorer of the hiddenness of the human psyche. In this chapter I will give an overview of Freud's major contributions to growth-oriented work with people and then identify some inadequacies of his system, when viewed from the growth perspective.

Many of Freud's key concepts have become a part of the common heritage of Western thought and of our general psychological understanding of persons. In this section I will describe six of these generic concepts that have been accepted by most traditional therapies, concepts that are a part of our legacy from Freud.

The first generic concept is what can be called the developmental perspective(2)--the view that human personality develops through a series of stages each with its inherent conflicts and growth potentialities. This understanding of human personality as a process is taken for granted by most therapies today. There are significant variations among traditional and contemporary therapies regarding the nature and importance of various stages. But that there is such a growth journey is a part of their common understanding of human beings.

For obvious reasons, the developmental perspective is fundamental to all growth work. This perspective is invaluable as a resource for understanding and facilitating healthy development through lifelong education and growth groups as well as for doing growth-oriented counseling and therapy. For example, when working with children in the grammar school period and with their parents, it is important to understand the general growth issues and needs that are typical of the particular life stages of the children and of their parents. To be aware of these growth themes is to be in touch with the broad context of the unique individual problems and potentials of particular children and their parents.

The second generic concept from Freud is the blocked- development view of pathology.

Psychological disturbance is understood as being caused by blocked development at a particular early life stage when the developmental conflict of that stage is not resolved satisfactorily. This "fixation" of growth at that stage results in a diminution or distortion of development at all subsequent life stages. Freud helped to make us aware of the profound destructiveness that occurs when the orderly process of growth is seriously blocked.

The basic psychoanalytic aim -- to provide opportunities to complete in a healthier relationship the unfinished growth tasks from the past which continue to distort the present -- is still viable and important. This concern should be a basic goal of all therapy and all growth groups, whatever their other goals. Use of the long-term, regressive methods of psychoanalysis, however, is not the most efficient or effective way to accomplish this regrowthing in most cases.

The third generic concept is the emphasis on the crucial influence of experiences during the earliest life stages on all subsequent development and functioning. As Freud persisted in asking the searching question "Why?" concerning the problems of his patients, the answers he got pointed further and further back into the early years of their lives. He discovered that the foundation of the building of personality is created during the first six years of life by the quality of a child's close relationships with need-satisfying adults. Freud's heavy emphasis on the profound influence of the earliest years is seen as extreme by several of the traditional therapies. But there is general agreement among them (as among developmental psychologists generally) that, for better or for worse, human growth is most rapid and crucial during these foundational years.

This emphasis on the early formative years has profound implications for growth-oriented approaches to people. To illustrate, the realization that parents of young children literally have the future at their fingertips is an awesome awareness pregnant with potentialities. It is essential for society to provide an abundance of growth-nurturing classes, workshops, and seminars for youth and young adults so that they will become more capable of satisfying, in personality-nurturing ways, the basic heart-hungers of the children they have or will soon have. Nothing could have a greater impact on the wholeness of the next generation than providing in every community a network of readily available growth and growth-repair (therapy) opportunities for parents of young children and parents-to-be. Members of all the counseling-therapy professions should take active leadership in developing such a network in the churches, high schools, colleges, adult education programs, and in all health care and counseling agencies of their communities!

The fourth generic concept from Freud is that the unconscious has a powerful influence on all aspects of our lives. The existence of the unconscious was discussed by more than fifty writers between 1680 and 1900. Freud's great achievement was to explore its structure and contents and to demonstrate how it influences our thoughts, feelings, fantasies, beliefs, and behavior.(3) By so doing he changed irrevocably the basic self-understanding of humankind. It was his illumination of the unconscious that makes Freud the conceptual grandparent of all "depth psychologies." As he discovered, it is through the repressed memories, wishes, conflicts, and impulses in the unconscious that painful experiences and unfinished growth from the early years continue to cripple the ability of many people to live creatively in the present. He demonstrated that bringing these repressed elements into the light of conscious awareness often facilitates healing and growth.

The idea of the unconscious is threatening to many people because it implies that we human beings are not in complete control of our own personalities. Yet, there is clear evidence that there are memories, wishes, and feelings that we cannot recall at will that do influence our behavior. As many people are at least dimly aware, there is a stranger within us. From both the psychoanalytic and the growth perspective, the inner stranger is a potential ally and friend. Until we begin to get to know the stranger, our unconscious resistances to change will tend to sabotage our conscious growth intentions. Bringing these defensive resistances to growth into the liberating light of consciousness can be a necessary part of the process of helping some people free themselves to grow. The more we establish open communication with our unconscious, and hear its messages (e.g., by understanding what our dreams and daydreams are telling us about ourselves), the greater our ability to live choicefully in the present and thereby move more intentionally into the future. Freud's view that dreams are the "royal road to the conscious" contributes a valuable awareness that can be used to help people develop the hidden growth resources of their psychic depths.

The psychoanalytic heritage has led to the discovery that the mind is like a vast house with many rooms on many levels. Our minds are much more powerful, intricate, and potentially creative (as well as destructive) than our conscious self-understanding can even imagine. The depth discoveries of psychoanalysis constitute an invaluable resource for understanding how our potentials for wholeness are imprisoned and how they can be liberated.

The fifth generic concept from Freud's thought is the principle of psychological causation (often called "psychological determinism"). This view holds that all human behavior has a cause or, in most cases, multiple causes. As Freud demonstrated, the most trivial and the most bizarre behavior is meaningful if we learn to understand its unconscious causes. Strange thoughts, fantasies, dreams, slips of the tongue, the jokes we think are funny, the place we sit in church, the way we feel when someone is angry, the things we remember, the people we like or don't like -- all make sense when we understand their hidden meaning. The fact that the human psyche is an orderly, cause-and-effect realm is what makes psychology as a science possible. This fact also makes it possible for psychotherapy to facilitate growth by enabling people to change the causes of their life-constricting feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and behavior. For growth-crippled people it can be tremendously energizing to discover the hidden dynamics of their diminished potentializing. By illuminating the causes of their repetitive, self-damaging patterns, therapy with a depth dimension can help them move toward liberation from the tyranny of the past, which continues to operate through these patterns.

The sixth generic insight from Freud's thought (closely linked with the fifth) is the recognition that all behavior is motivated by drives and needs.(4) Deeply disturbed people are torn by unconscious conflicts between different needs and drives. The findings of psychoanalytic research reveals that even the self-damaging and crippling behavior of severely disturbed persons is somehow functional. It serves some defensive need of which they are consciously unaware. For example, the functional paralysis of a middle-aged man's arm expressed the immobilizing conflict between the unconscious desire and the fear of striking out in rage at a person on whom he felt passively de-pendent. The paralysis served the purpose of blocking the acting out of his long-repressed rage, which would have led to overwhelming guilt (from his superego) and probably resulted in retaliation by the other person. Psychoanalytically informed growth therapies aim at helping people face and resolve their energy-depleting inner conflicts and satisfy their appropriate needs in ways that are constructive for themselves and others.

Other Growth Resources from Freud

What is often called Freud's "tragic vision" is an accurate and valuable (though painful) perception of the dark, irrational, destructive side of human life. Freud's remarkable tough-minded realism enabled him to become aware of the truncated freedom, entrapment by the past, profound inner conflicts, resistances to change, ambiguity, and paradoxes in the human psyche. Like many great thinkers, he grappled with the absurdity and tragedy that are a part of the human situation. Freud saw that we cannot have everything we want in life -- e.g., that in order to develop our full capacity to love we must lose in our first love affair (the so-called Oedipal and Electra conflict).

Freud identified the universal tendency to self-deception in human beings, showing that human motivation is seldom as simple or as pure as it may seem on the surface.(5)

Freud's tragic vision, though incomplete from the growth perspective, reveals a dimension of human reality that cannot be ignored by anyone who wants to facilitate growth. Our effectiveness as growth enablers will be enhanced if we see and understand persons through the glasses of growth. These glasses must be bifocal!(6) The psychoanalytic therapies make a significant contribution by providing the bottom lens for these bifocals. This is the lens that enables us to see and understand the psychopathology and unresolved conflict that are present in "normal," functional people, as well as in dysfunctional people. Our work with people will be growthful only if it is based on an open-eyed awareness of the reality, depth, complexity, and tenacity of human broken-ness. Approaches that perceive persons only through the upper lens of the bifocals (which enables one to see the strengths and positive potentials in everyone) sabotage their own effectiveness by their incomplete vision of human beings. Freud was accurate when he insisted that we must look at the truth about ourselves, whether we like it or not, if we are to grow. His realism is a salutary corrective for any tendencies we may have toward easy optimism. Respect for reality, including its tragic dimension, is the only solid foundation for human potentializing. It is important to recall that there is a heroic quality about Freud's commitment to helping people salvage all that they could of productive living in the midst of life's trappedness and tragedy. When asked about the central goal of his therapy, he responded that it was to enable people "to love and to work."

Freud's discoveries concerning the parallelism and interaction between psychological and sexual factors in human development have profound implications for understanding blocked growth. Many of his insights concerning the power and pervasiveness of human sexuality from the beginnings of life are useful for growthful parenting as well as for therapeutic repair work later in life. We can be grateful for the courage it must have taken to continue exploring the taboo-shrouded area of infantile sexuality, in spite of bitter attacks from the scientific and medical communities of his day. The healing and growth insights that are available from the psychoanalytic understanding of psychosexual development through adolescence, particularly as these insights have been extended by Erik Erikson and corrected by feminist psychologists, offer valuable conceptual tools for understanding and facilitating human growth. The recognition of the vital role of sexual crippledness and diminution in general psychological and interpersonal problems (and vice versa) is, in itself, a crucial concept for helping people develop their wasted potentials for fulfillment, ecstasy, and joy.

Freud's concepts of transference and countertransference are valuable growth resources.(7) In psychoanalytic therapy, transference is understood as the projection of repressed wishes and feelings from early-life relationships onto the analyst. The "transference neurosis" thus established is used as an opportunity for the person to relive and redo the unfinished growth work from the past. As one becomes aware of the transference projections and lets go of them, the grip of the past on the present is gradually diminished. Countertransference is the unconscious projection by therapists onto their clients of unconscious material from their own early relationships. Transference and countertransference factors are present to some degree in all therapeutic and teacher student relationships. If therapy is to be growth-enabling, therapists must become aware (through their own therapy) of their counter- transference projections so that they can withdraw these and relate to clients authentically in the present. Transference is a way of trying to continue past relationships by recreating present relationships in their image. It also serves to block awareness of the newness present in today's relationships. As Freud made clear, effective therapists must frustrate the transference needs of their clients so that they can become aware of and change the growth-inhibiting way in which they are attempting to live in past relationships. Transference dynamics also operate in other close relationships. For example, the most common unconscious growth-blocking factor in marriages is what has been called "parentifying one's spouse" -- i.e., seeing one's spouse as a good or bad mother or father figure. Chronic problems with bosses, min-isters, and other authority figures often root in unconscious transference projections. (People often project infantile, magical transference feelings about God onto ministers.) All of us who work closely with people need to be aware of transference dynamics so that we can facilitate growth beyond them.

Though not the first to do so, Freud viewed religious behavior, attitudes, and beliefs as legitimate objects of psychological investigation. Thus he helped to lay the foundation of the contemporary discipline of psychology of religion, an essential resource in counseling on spiritual issues. He made a profound contribution to our understanding of the many forms of pathogenic, growth diminishing religion that constrict the wholeness of so many people today. Recognizing that our religious ideas and feelings are deeply influenced by early experiences with need-satisfying adults, he saw accurately that we tend unconsciously to project our need for a perfect parent figure onto the universe as we create our perception of deity. Freud pointed to the magical, infantile feelings and longings that continue to dominate many people's religious lives long after the reality principle has gained ascendancy in other areas of their lives. He saw the obsessive-compulsive dimension that is very prominent in many conventional religious practices. He threw light on the growth crippling effects of such unfree, infantile, reality-denying religion. All of us who are committed to nurturing spiritual growth as an essential dimension of human potentializing stand in Freud's debt for these contributions.

Freud accurately identified the process by which the conscience is developed and its initial contents determined. He saw how the values of a culture, as these are incarnated in the attitudes and behavior of parents, are internalized by children as they experience these values in the rewards punishment, praise-blame responses of their parents. When dealing in counseling and therapy with problems of immature or distorted conscience -- e.g., neurotic guilt or lack of appropriate guilt -- these insights, as they have been refined and developed subsequently by other psychoanalytic thin-kers, are invaluable working concepts.

Some Inadequacies in Freud's Thought

In spite of Freud's enormous growth contributions, there are serious weaknesses, gaps, and in-accuracies in his thought when viewed from a growth perspective. The fundamental inadequacy from which the other weaknesses are derived is his impoverished view of the nature of human beings. He saw human personality in biologically reductionistic, pathology-centered ways. He illuminated psychopathology in brilliant ways, but he neglected the healthy dimensions that are pre-sent in all persons, even the most disturbed. When he attempted to create a general psychology of personality, based on his findings from studying neurotic patients, he did not see that health is much more than the absence of gross pathology.

Freud helped to provide the pathology lens of the growth enabler's glasses, but he was not aware of the need for another lens. He failed to see fully the profound strivings and resources for growth that people can use to transcend or transform their brokenness. This fundamental gap in his per-ception of people reinforced his deep pessimism. From the growth perspective, the pathology lens functions most therapeutically when the other lens is present to enable us to see pathology in the context of the people's potentials for wholeness. The pathology lens prevents shallow optimism, while the top lens allows one to see strengths and growth possibilities in persons who otherwise appear hopeless. The two lenses together function in ways that energize a reality-based hope for creative change.

Freud's instinctivistic and biological reductionism led him to a mechanistic model of human beings reflecting nineteenth-century Newtonian physics. He viewed the ego as a puny being caught between powerful instinctual drives and id impulses, on the one hand, and the harsh demands of society, intemalized in the superego, on the other. This conception left little room for seeing the possibility of a strong, unifying self that can enable persons to orchestrate their own conflicts and growth struggles effectively. Freud's understanding of psychological causation smacks of hard determinism. He rightly emphasized the unconscious trapped- ness of human beings. But he did not believe that people have the capacity to increase their self-awareness significantly on their own, or to function out of the "conflict-free" areas of their personalities. The working concept of psychological causation can be retained, however, without surrendering to rigid determinism, by showing that the self, the center of our being, can become the most important cause of behavior. Growth in inner freedom consists of becoming more self-causing, more free to rearrange constructively the unchangeable givens of one's life.

Freud accurately described the primitive, impulsive, and destructive aspects of the unconscious. He did not emphasize (as did Jung) the potential riches and creativity that are also available in the depths of the psyche. He dichotomized the rational and the nonrational, mythic and intuitive sides, and invested reason (divorced from these resources) with an exaggerated faith. His fascination with origins caused him to exaggerate the influence of the past. He rejected the notion that the future can energize human intentionality by luring people (teleologically) toward new possibilities. Freud reduced all the cultural achievements of humankind -- art, philosophy, religion, and so forth -- to sublimated sexual energy. This reductionism implied a rejection of any height dimension in human personality having its own inherent integrity in the functioning of personality.

The hyperindividualistic, instinct-centered view of Freud reduced human development to what is essentially the intrapsychic evolving of the instincts. He underestimated the powerful influence of interpersonal relationships in all human growth. This error was compounded by the paucity of

cross-cultural studies which led him to assume inaccurately that he could extrapolate from the characteristics of mid-Victorian Viennese patients in describing a universal psychology. Many of his generalizations about psychosexual development have been challenged and corrected by subsequent developmental, feminist, and cross-cultural studies.

Because of his intrapsychic focus, Freud's depth psychology lacks a breadth dimension, which would have allowed him to see that we human beings are also interpersonal in our very essence and that therapy must also deal with the interpersonal systems that nurture or starve our growth. His individualism and his pessimism apparently caused Freud to misunderstand the relation between the individual and society, seeing these as essentially antagonistic. He rejected Adier's view that people have a basic striving to satisfy their needs for power and worth in ways that do not alienate them from others. Consequently Freud was not interested in developing an ecological ethic based on the awareness that, in the long run, the real good of individuals requires cooperation, not conflict and competition. Today, our ultimate welfare and even survival depend on developing such an ethic and discovering the basis for such cooperation in personal and intergroup relationships.

Because Freud's understanding of human beings reflected a nineteenth-century energy theory, he did not see that interpersonal transactions are different, in some basic ways, from the exchanges of physical energy. His view that self-love (narcissism) somehow depletes the energy available for loving others caused him to miss the key insight (developed by Erich Fromm and others) that genuine self-love, self-respect, and self-caring provide the only firm foundation for genuinely loving others. Chronic narcissism, rather than being self-love, is really a symptom of self-doubt, self-rejection, and lack of ego strength.

With all his brilliant insights into pathogenic religions, Freud was unaware of the fact that growth nurturing, salugenic (wholeness-fostering) religions even existed. He generalized on his appropriate critique of the infantile, obsessive-compulsive, wish-dominated religions (with their roots in tribalism and totemism) that he encountered in his patients, assuming that he was describing all religions. He was unaware of the fact that human beings are inherently transpersonal and that we cannot fulfill our basic potentialities fully unless we develop the spiritual dimension of our lives. His world view was derived from nineteenth-century scientific rationalism which made reason his god. Freud's understanding of the superego, the immature, authority-centered con-science, stopped short of recognizing that there are other stages of moral maturing beyond this early stage. Persons who continue to grow in this area gradually learn to evaluate and partially transcend the values of their parents and culture, which they internalized during early childhood. Freud does not help us understand the more mature, autonomous conscience, whose values are based on the ego's perceptions of what is authentically good for oneself and for others, rather than on the dictates of one's superego.(8) His use of the "death instinct" as an explanation of all human evil and destructiveness prevented Freud from understanding the complex and varied sources of this negative side of human life.

Freud's enormous blind spots regarding women produced major inaccuracies in his psychology of women. These distortions reinforced the sexism in most psychotherapy during and since his times. He assumed that what he saw in neurotic women patients (masochism and nonassertiveness, for example) was normative for women generally, rather than the consequence of the crippling effects of the patriarchal culture in which they lived. His unconscious sexism caused him to exaggerate the role of fathers and underestimate the role of mothers in the growth of children. As feminist psychologists are now showing, many of his theories about "normal" psychosexual development are actually descriptions of the ways in which boys and girls develop in a patriarchal culture. Unwittingly, by his assumptions, Freud reinforced the norms and values of a patriarchal culture in ways that have tended to increase its destructiveness for both women and men. Some of the traditional psychoanalytic methods for opening up blocked communication between the unconscious and the conscious mind, e.g., free association and analyzing the transference neurosis, are unnecessarily time-consuming and expensive and their therapeutic effectiveness does not seem to be confirmed by empirical research evidence. The use of psychoanalytic methods is justifiable mainly as instruments of depth research into the human psyche. As is true of all long-term intrapsychic, nonsystemic approaches to therapy, psychoanalysis has little relevance to the task of healing the brokenness of the masses of humankind. Freud himself was aware of this but saw no basis for a wider hope.

Growth Resources from the Ego Analysts

A movement toward more growth-centered understandings of human beings and of therapy has occurred in many traditional as well as contemporary therapies. The most creative thrust in psychoanalysis since Freud -- the work of the ego psychologists or ego analysts -- introduces a robust emphasis on health understood as growth.(9) This thrust has produced a radical, growth-centered metamorphosis within psychoanalytic thought, which has corrected many of the weaknesses in Freud's thought.

Ego psychology has developed on two fronts, the first represented by Anna Freud (Sigmund's daughter), and the second by Heinz Hartmann, David Rapaport, and Erik Erikson. In 1923 Freud introduced his "structural hypothesis,"(10) which stated that the personality is organized into three basic energy systems. The id is the seat of the primitive, instinctual sexual and aggressive energies, which provide the raw material out of which the entire psyche develops. The id is ruled by the pleasure principle rather than by logic, sense data, or moral considerations. The ego is developed from the id energies to allow the organism to cope with external reality and obtain maximum satisfactions. The ego is governed by the reality principle. The superego, a subsystem of the ego, develops by internalizing the culture's values in order to guide the organism's behavior in ways approved by that particular society. The id is entirely unconscious; major functions of the ego and superego also operate unconsciously. Freud concentrated his major efforts on understanding the id and the unconscious. Since he saw the ego as derivative from and the servant of the id, he believed that it was extremely vulnerable to id impulses and control. The ego psycholo-gists, as the name suggests, have focused their attention on understanding the functioning of the ego. As a result of their research, the ego is now seen within psychoanalysis as having a central and dynamic place in determining the psychic health of the whole person.

In her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, (11) Anna Freud explored in depth the ego's unconscious defenses against anxiety (described originally by her father). She gave the ego

a new status by showing how the ego defenses are the key to understanding both healthy and disordered personality dynamics.

From a growth perspective, knowledge of the dynamics of the ego's defenses is a valuable resource because it clarifies the ways in which people unconsciously isolate themselves from painful reality and from the growth that is possible only by dealing more openly with this reality. Among the defenses frequently encountered in counseling and therapy are repression (of painful memories into the unconscious); fixation (at a safer-feeling growth stage); regression (to an earlier, safer-feeling .stage); projection (onto others of the feelings or impulses eliciting anxiety); rationalization (giving oneself and others reasonable excuses for unreasonable behavior); denial (of threatening aspects of reality); introjection (seeking protection by identifying internally with a feared person or idea); reaction formation (denying threatening impulse by going to the other extreme in one's behavior -- e.g., denying repressed rage by behaving in super "loving" ways); intellectualizing (avoiding threatening feelings by chronic "head-tripping").  

All of us have and need defenses to cope with the pressures and crises of our lives. When failure feelings become too intense in me, my response is rationalization or projection of responsibility onto circumstances or other people. If my ego is relatively resilient at the time, my defenses relax as my self-esteem recovers. I gradually become aware of my own responsibility in causing or contributing to the failure experience, and eventually decide what I must do about it.

In growth enabling work, it is important to remember that people have defenses because they still need them, or believe they do, because they once needed them desperately to maintain even minimal feelings of worth and power. The problem with ego defenses is that they often function in compulsive, life-constricting ways, long after the original threat is gone, rather than being temporary defenses when self-esteem is too threatened. When they operate in rigid compulsive ways, the energy they consume is unavailable for growth. Growth can occur when people cope with painful reality by using and thus strengthening their personality's coping "muscles." People let go of energy-squandering defenses not when those defenses are attacked, but when their self-esteem and confidence grow stronger. Only then can they risk living more openly, vulnerably, and authentically.

The research of Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson moves far beyond Anna Freud's focus on the defensive functions of the ego to examine the ego's many capacities for constructive coping. In their thought, the ego is seen in ways that are very similar to the "self" in contemporary therapies -- as the potentially effective coordinator of the overall integration and development of the whole personality. Hartmann focuses psychoanalytic thought on the healthy, conflict-free dimensions of personality. (12) He sees the ego as having a growing autonomy and strength of its own. Rather than being derived from the id, both the ego and the id develop from the more fundamental bio-psychic resources of the organism. The infant is born with resources that gradually mature into "ego apparatuses," basic tools for handling both the inner instinctual drives and the demands of the external world. These developing apparatuses include thinking, perception, memory, language, and all the other psychological and neuromuscular skills of a growing person. Hartmann integrated psychoanalytic insights with developmental studies in psychology, showing that the human organism has a built-in timetable for the development of the ego's potential abilities. This developmental timetable is influenced but not determined (except in case of extreme pathology) by unconscious, instinctual forces.

The implications and applications of this newer psychoanalytic understanding of growth are many and profound. For example, children learn to walk and talk according to their own neuromuscular

developmental timetable. This process can be delayed or disrupted only by severe unconscious conflicts fostered by severely depriving relationships with parents. Once children have learned to walk or talk, they have acquired ego skills of enormous value for coping with their physical and interpersonal environment in ego-strengthening ways. This principle can be used in doing re-educative, action-oriented counseling and therapy. Shy, socially inept adolescents may be helped to increase their self-esteem and sense of competence by being coached and encouraged in basic social skills that will allow them to experience success in peer relationships. Youth who feel trapped in vicious cycles of repeated failures may be helped to interrupt the cycle by being coach-ed and supported as they accomplish modest realistic goals. Acquiring practical skills for effective action (rather than insight) is the key to the growth that occurs in such counseling. Ego psychology illuminates the growth that occurs in crises and in supportive relationships within which new coping-with-life skills are learned. I have been impressed repeatedly with the remarkable growth I have seen in many alcoholics who, with no formal therapy, found in AA an ego-strengthening, growth-nurturing environment.

As a result of the more dynamic conception of the ego derived from the work of the ego analysts, Sigmund Freud's tripartite model of personality has become more valuable as a resource for facilitating growth. It can be used as a shorthand way of understanding the therapy that is needed to overcome some common types of growth blockages. To illustrate, some people (called "psychoneurotics" in traditional psychiatric nomenclature) are tyrannized by cruel superegos (hairshirt consciences), which produce neurotic guilt and anxiety. They need to develop more accepting consciences, guided by what they genuinely value rather than by fear of punishment. Persons who are easily pushed around by the demands of others need to develop a stronger sense of their own worth and power so that they will not be manipulable. These two types of growth often occur as such persons experience the acceptance of and then gradually identify with the more robust self-esteem and accepting conscience of the counselor-therapist.

People with very weak egos and rigid defenses that cut them off from perceiving major areas of reality but do not protect them from feeling flooded by raw impulses from the id, need a different type of help. Such people (called "psychotics" or "borderline personalities" in traditional psychiatric nomenclature) often need a long-term supportive relationship that reinforces the effectiveness of their less reality-denying defenses and allows them to gain ego strength by coping better with everyday realities. Uncovering, insight-oriented therapy is usually contraindicated because it is too anxiety-producing. Within the safety of warm, supportive individual or small group counseling relationships, growth in coping-with-life ego skills often can occur.

Persons with immature or malformed superegos (called "character disorder" or "psychopathic personalities" in traditional psychiatric language) need a different type of growth and therefore a different approach to therapy. Such persons act out their inner conflicts with little insight or guilt. To help them the therapist needs to use behavior modification or "reality therapy" approaches aimed at helping them learn to control their destructive acting out.

Growth-enabling counseling and therapy must include two essential experiences -- acceptance and caring, on the one hand, and confrontation with reality, on the other. I call these two ingredients together the growth formula.(13) A crucial decision in applying the growth formula involves deciding what balance between the two ingredients will be most likely to activate the growth elan in a particular person. Ascertaining the relative ego strength of clients is a prerequisite to making this decision. In general, the greater the degree of ego strength, the more confrontation can be accepted growth-fully by persons. The weaker the ego, the more support and acceptance are needed as the context of even gentle confrontation. When persons come for help, here are some of the questions counselors should ask themselves to gain a sense of their current ego strength:

What is the nature and quality of their ego defenses? Are they using heavy defenses (e.g., denial or extreme projection) or light defenses (e.g., rationalization or mild projection)? Do their de-fenses feel compulsive and rigid or relatively flexible? Do they have any self-awareness that they may be denying aspects of reality by their defenses? As the counseling relationship develops, do they gradually relax their defenses and become more open to awareness of reality? What is the quality of their pattern of relationships? Is trust, mutuality, continuity, or commitment present in them? Are they able to develop trust within the therapeutic relationship? How constructively do they handle everyday crises and frustrations? How quickly do they begin to mobilize new coping skills? How do they cope with the normal responsibilities? How well (including how flexibly) do they organize their lives as they cope with their situation? To what extent does their behavior reflect a sense of self-esteem, competence, and power?

In general, persons who use heavy, inflexible defenses, are unable to sustain relationships of trust and mutuality, cope ineffectively, become disorganized or regress quickly when confronted with everyday crises and responsibilities, and are very dependent on others for sustaining their necessary sense of worth and power, suffer from ego weakness and dysfunction. Ego weakness is present in many chronic alcoholics and drug addicts, persons with multiple psychosomatic problems, delinquents and criminals, and people whose lives seem to consist of one (or several) crisis after another. Social oppression and deprivation deplete the ego resources of many women and members of minority groups in our sexist and racist culture. One's degree of ego strength changes constantly. Under sufficient internal or external stresses, anyone will show temporary ego dysfunction.

Ego psychology has given supportive counseling, in its various forms, a new importance. The greater the degree of ego dysfunction, temporary or chronic, the more need there is for using supportive methods in counseling and therapy.(14) Growth in the ability to cope constructively can occur in supportive relationships as the counselor or the support group helps persons gratify their dependency needs; drain off powerful, ego-paralyzing feelings (e.g., guilt, failure, anxiety); review their situation more objectively; and plan and implement realistic ways of coping constructively with their situation. Confrontation must be gentle, and the need for ego defenses must be respected until the need for support diminishes.

Erik Erikson's many-faceted ego psychology has enriched the developmental thrust in con-temporary psychoanalytic thinking and practice tremendously. With his growth-centered vision of what it is to be whole, and his profound respect for the ego's creative capacities, he has redefined many of Freud's working concepts. As Don Browning says: "Erikson believes that the ego, in contrast to the superego and id, is the human counterpart of those regulatory capacities of animals which assure their ecological integrity. It is the ego which is the real servant of evolution, adaptation, and the cycle of the generations."(15) Like Freud, Erikson understands health developmentally. But he corrects Freud's myopic view that most if not all major growth changes occur before the end of adolescence (unless one undergoes extensive psychoanalysis). Erikson extends the developmental view of wholeness throughout the life cycle. Each of his eight stages has its new growth tasks, conflicts, risks, and new ego strengths that develop as growth tasks are accomplished. To illustrate, adolescents are "healthy" to the degree that they are developing a strong sense of identity with the accompanying ego strength, fidelity. Mid-years persons are healthy to the degree that they are creating a life-style of generativity with its ego strength of care. In the companion volume to this one, I have suggested a variety of growth-enabling ways of using a modified version of Erikson's growth schema with fourteen stages.(16)

Erikson adds an essential sociocultural dimension to Freud's psychosexual understanding of human development, integrating the two with the light touch and sensitivities of an artist (which was his background before becoming a psychoanalyst). He thus provides the relational institutional-cultural context of individual development. Unlike Freud, Erikson does not see individual strivings as inherently antagonistic to the demands of society. He shows that there are vital resources for nurturing human growth in all cultures, even though there is also some necessary sacrifice of individual instinctual strivings. Individuals can become and remain strong

only in the supportive context of their culture's institutions, the interdependency of the generations, and "a widening radius of significant individuals and institutions"(17) throughout their lives. Erikson criticizes Western culture because it provides an impoverished environment for nurturing the ego in its task of integrating experience and gaining mastery of one's life situation.

One of the vital resources for growth-enablers in Erikson's thought is his emphasis on the power of the future and of hope. Like Hartmann, he sees the infant as being born with a built-in ground plan and the necessary resources for growth in all the- life stages. He calls this the "epigenetic principle" and regards it as the energizing motif of all human growth. He reverses Freud's attempt to explain the present by the past, making the pull of one's growth potential toward the future the explanatory principle.(18) Hope, a basic orientation toward the future, is the most indispensable strength of the ego. Hope is nurtured in small children when faith and trust pervade their parents' pattern of caring.

Erikson makes invaluable contributions to our understanding of spiritual growth. With the touch of an artist, he describes psychoanalysis as a Western form of meditation -- a way of getting in touch with vital inner processes. Faith, like health, is understood developmentally. To be alive, faith must continue to grow. (19) The foundation of faith (and the cornerstone of healthy personality), is basic trust, the growth goal of the first life stage. In adolescence, faith must grow to include a meaningful ideology; in the mid-years, to include generativity; and so on throughout life. Erikson sees religious institutions as ò an important means of helping parents renew their inner trust regularly so that their children can experience and internalize trust from them. "Trust, then, becomes the capacity for faith -- a vital need for which man [sic] must find some institutional confirmation. Religion, it seems, is the oldest and has been the most lasting institution to serve the ritual restoration of a sense of trust in the form of faith while offering a tangible formula for a sense of evil against which it promises to defend man."(20)

In his studies of Luther and Gandhi, Erikson has illuminated the role of dynamic religious leaders whose personal and existential conflicts reflect the central conflicts of their age. Their resolution of these conflicts becomes a kind of universal drama that gives meaning to many people in their cultures. Such a spiritual leader becomes "a cultural worker who creates out of the conflicts of his time, a new identity for his age."(21)

Erikson calls for the creation of a growth model of ethics. The golden rule, he suggests, could well be reformulated "to say that it is best to do to another . . . what will develop his best potentials even as it develops your own."(22) He points to the need in our modern world for a universal ethic in which nurturing and caring for the growth of others (generativity) becomes the guiding motif: "The overriding issue is the creation not of a new ideology but of a universal ethic. . . . This can be advanced only by men and women who are neither ideological youths nor moralistic old men [or women], but who know that from generation to generation the test of what you produce is the care it inspires."(23)

One significant weakness in Erikson's thought is his psychology of women. As feminist psychologists have shown, his views of "inner space" reflect sex role stereotypes, even though they are far less blatant than Freud's sexist biases.(24) In spite of this serious limitation, Erikson represents psychoanalysis in its most open, free, and growth-enabling expression.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in the Therapy of Freud

Fadiman, James, and Frager, Robert. "Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis," Personality and Personal Growth. Harper, 1976, chap. 1. A succinct overview of Freud's major concepts.

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, vols. 15-16, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-66. A series of lectures to students at the University of Vienna.

----The Interpretation of Dreams (Standard Edition of Freud's Complete Works, vols. 4-5). According to Freud, contains "the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make."

---New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Standard Edition, vol. 22). Includes Freud's structural hypothesis.

Fromm, Erich. Sigmund Freud's Mission. New York: Harper and Bros., 1950. An evaluation and analysis of Freud's personality and influence.

Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1953, 1955, 1957. The standard biography of Freud in three volumes. Vol. 3 includes a historical review of Freud's thought on a variety of topics.

Rothgeb, Carrie L. Abstracts of the Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Jason Aronson, 1973. Brief synopses of all Freud's writing with an introduction to reading Freud by Robert R. Holt.

For Further Exploration of Growth Resources in the Therapy of the Ego Analysts

Browning, Don. Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Philadelphia: Westminster

Press, 1973. A depth study of Erikson, Fromm, Hartmann, Robert White, Norman Brown, and Phillip Rieff and their views of wholeness and society.

Clinebell, Howard. "Ego Psychology and Pastoral Counseling," Pastoral Psychology, February

1963, pp. 24-36. Discusses the basic concepts of ego psychology as resources for strengthening the effectiveness of supportive counseling.

Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. A ground breaking book that sets forth his eight stages of growth.

---Identity, Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. Explains the identity crises of

adolescents in contemporary America. ù. Insight and Responsibility. New York: W. W. Norton, 1964. Essays on the ethical implications of psychoanalytic insights.

---Young Man Luther. New York: W. W. Norton, 1958. A psychoanalytic study of Luther's developmental crises and their impact on his times.

---Gandhi's Truth. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. Shows how Gandhi's childhood and youth prepared him to be the revolutionary innovator of militant nonviolence.

Gleason, John J., Jr. Growing Up to God: Eight Steps in Religious Development. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1975. Applies Erikson's stages to religious development.

Hartmann, Heinz. "Ego Psychology and the Problems of Adaptation," David Rapaport, ed., in Organization and Pathology of Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951, pp. 362-98. A basic statement of Hartmann's perspective.

Parad, Howard J., ed. Ego Psychology and Dynamic Casework. New York: Family Service Assn. of America, 1958. A series of papers on the implications and applications of ego psychology in working with various types of clients.

Notes

1. Much of this biographical information is taken from the succinct biographical statement in

James Fadiman and Robert Frager, Personality and Personal Growth (New York: Harper, 1976), pp. 4-9; for an in-depth biography of Freud see the classical three-volume work by Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953, 1955, 1957).

2. Ruth L. Monroe delineates the first four of these generic concepts in Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought (New York: Dryden Press, 1955), chapter 2.

3. See Lancelot L. Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960).

4. In Freud's thought, behavior is seen as motivated by instinctual drives and needs.

5. I am indebted to Rod Hunter for calling my attention to the importance of these points and to a variety of other contributions from Freud's thought.

6. For a discussion of this concept see Growth Counseling, pp. 52-55, 63.

7. For a discussion of this issue see "Transference and Countertransference in Pastoral Care," by E. Mansell Pattison, Journal of Pastoral Care, Winter 1965, pp. 193-202.

8. For further exploration of this issue see Donald E. Miller's Wing-Footed Wanderer: Conscience and Transcendence (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977) and John Hoffman's Ethical Confrontation in Counseling (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979).

9. Ruth Monroe describes the thought of the ego psychologists as "the mainstream of progress in Freudian psychoanalysis." Schools of Psychoanalysis, p. 104.

10. See Freud's New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

11. Translated by Cecil Baines (New York: International Universities Press, 1946).

12. Hartmann, using an analogy, points out that a full description of a nation must include much more than its conflicts and wars. To understand a nation one must know about all its peaceful activities, the development of its populace, its social structure, economy, peace-time traffic across its borders, and so on. The same principle applies when one is seeking to understand or help people.

13. Growth Counseling, pp. 55-56.

14. I have discussed four types of supportive counseling in Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966), chap. 8.

15. Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), p. 155.

16. Growth Counseling, chap. 6.

17. Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 93.

18. See Browning, Generative Man, p. 181.  

19. For a discussion of religious development, using Erikson's stages, see LeRoy Aden, "Faith and the Developmental Cycle," Pastoral Psychology, Spring, 1976; and John J. Gleason, Jr., Growing Up to God: Eight Steps in Religious Development (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1975).

20. Identity, Youth and Crisis, p. 106. (Sic in brackets is used here and in other quotations throughout Contemporary Growth Therapies as a device to call to the reader's awareness the sexist connotations of the generic use of masculine nouns and pronouns.)

21. Browning, Generative Man, p. 149.

22. Insight and Responsibility (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), p. 233.

23. Identity, Youth and Crisis, p. 260.

24. See Growth Counseling, pp. 160-61; also Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 210-21; Erikson, "Inner and Outer Space: Reflections on Womanhood," Daedalus, 93 (1964), pp. 582-606.

The basic assumption that undergirds this book is that the fundamental goal of all counseling and all psychotherapy (as well as of all creative education) is to maximize human wholeness! The various short-term counseling methods are understood as means of enabling people to handle life crises growth fully. The techniques of psychotherapy are essentially ways of helping people whose growth has been deeply diminished by painful early-life experiences or by multiple crises, to free themselves for continuing growth. Creative education and growth groups are means for enabling those who are living "normal" lives to use more of their potentialities and thus to increase the creativity, zest, joy, and significance-for-humankind of their life styles. All these growthing arts are ways of enabling people to use more of their unfolding strength and possibilities. The central task of counselors, therapists, and growth-oriented teachers is to awaken realizable hopes for creative change in persons and then to help them actualize these hopes. The process by which persons grow is called "potentializing" or "growth work."

It's important to spell out more fully the perspective from which the various therapies will be viewed in this book. I call this perspective Growth Counseling. This is an approach to perceiving and understanding people, and to helping them grow through counseling and therapy. Here is an overview of the working principles of Growth Counseling:(1)

--- Most persons possess a wealth of undeveloped strengths, assets, and capacities. Most of us use only a small percentage of our physical, mental, spiritual, and relational potentialities.

---There is a gentle, often suppressed, but persistent striving in persons to keep developing their evolving potentials. The process of activating this growth elan is at the heart of all effective education, counseling, and therapy.

---People need to develop their unused gifts in the six interdependent dimensions of their lives -- in their bodies and minds, their relationships with other people, nature, institutions, and God. Genuine "happiness" is a by-product of continuing potentializing in these six dimensions.

---The growth drive is diminished in many persons by a variety of factors including emotional malnutrition, toxic relationships, economic deprivation, social oppression, and their own fear of and resistance to growth.

---Adequate physical wholeness (resulting from good nutrition, exercise, and health care) is a valuable foundation for full development of the other five dimensions.

---Each life stage offers new growth resources and possibilities as well as new problems and losses. Wholeness is a lifelong journey of becoming.

---Health or wholeness is much more than the absence of gross pathology. It is the presence of positive whole-person wellness resulting from continuing growth.

---Psychopathology is essentially long and severely diminished and distorted growth. A low level of potentializing makes people very vulnerable to developing mental, emotional, physical, psychosomatic, interpersonal, and spiritual illnesses.

---When one's growth is deeply diminished for a long time, the growth energies and potential creativity often become distorted into malignant destructiveness, which hurts oneself, others, and often society.

---Counseling and therapy are means of helping people to overcome diminished and distorted growth, by developing their potentialities through moving intentionally toward their own growth goals.

---Counselors, therapists, and teachers are essentially growth-enablers who must themselves continue growing if they are to nurture the growth of others.

---Growth-enabling therapy and education involve helping people activate their intuitive, imaginative, right-brain capacities and integrate these with their rational, analytical, left-brain capacities.

---The growth-enabler's seeing and affirming the hidden strengths and capacities in others helps them to discover and develop those potentialities.

---Creative education and counseling-therapy are complementary diversions of one growth- enabling process.

---Spiritual growth, the enhancement of one's values, meanings, "peak experiences," and relationship with God, is central to whole-person growth.

All growth is a gift of Spirit, the source of all life, to be received and developed. In a profound sense, human growth is a joyful mystery to be celebrated.

---The gift of growth is received when we choose to develop our options intentionally. The process of growth, though deeply fulfilling, often involves pain and struggle.

---Laughter (particularly at oneself) and play are inherently healing and growth-enabling.

---Life crises, both accidental and developmental, can be used as opportunities for growth, if persons encounter them in a context of meaning and within the loving support of a network of caring.

---The futures that people expect, image, and work toward can pull them forward toward those futures. Hope, a future-oriented expectation, is the essential energy for constructive change. The effective counselor-therapist-teacher is an awakener of realistic hope for growth in persons.

---The present moment is the arena of potentializing. Only within the present can the painful and the enriching experiences of one's past and the call of one's future be integrated growthfully.

---Growth occurs in relationships. The quality of one's closest relationships and one's wider community of caring determines, to considerable extent, whether and how rapidly one grows.

---Relationships in which both love-acceptance-empathy, on the one hand, and openness-congruence-confrontation, on the other, are experienced (this is the "growth formula") tend to energize the growth elan of persons within those relationships.

---Reaching out to others with caring, to encourage and nurture growth, is essential for the continuation of one's own growth.

---Individual, relational, institutional, and societal change are deeply interdependent. Institutionalized injustice and social, economic, and political oppression diminish human potentializing on a wholesale basis, while teachers, therapists, and parents strive to facilitate it on a retail (individual) basis. Working to change the wider systems that diminish people's growth often is essential to sustain growth within them and their close relationships. Rather than ad-justing people to growth-crippling institutions, constructive counseling and therapy seek to empower people to work with others to change the institutional and societal roots of individual problems.

---Our people-serving institutions (especially churches, schools, and health agencies) should redefine their purposes and revise their programs to become better human wholeness centers devoted to helping people maximize growth throughout the life journey. Every community needs a network of such wellness-growth centers. To increase their effectiveness in nurturing wholeness, these institutions need to develop a variety of nurture-growth groups.

---Churches and temples should become better spiritual wholeness centers, places for facilitating holistic health centering in spiritual growth.

The Five Streams

The abundance of therapies available today poses a perplexing problem for those who are convinced that no one approach has all the therapeutic answers. The issue is how to develop an integrated eclecticism that utilizes insights and methods from a variety of sources coherently and in ways that maximize the unique personality resources of the practitioner. The difficulty that stems from just assembling therapeutic components from different sources is that this approach usually produces a kind of hash eclecticism --a theory from here, a technique from there -- with no integrating structure, no internally consistent core of assumptions about the nature, process, and goals of therapeutic change. Those who practice the growthing arts on such a shaky conceptual foundation run the risk of unwittingly using concepts and methods that work against one another and thus diminish the effectiveness of the process. Their approach lacks the power-for-growth that can come from using a consistent coherent conceptuality.

For a number of years, I used the psychoanalytic, neo-Freudian system as such a unifying conceptual framework. I now find the basic principles of Growth Counseling as summarized above to be a more change-producing conceptual framework. This orientation offers a framework of assumptions and principles within which a counselor-therapist-teacher can develop her or his unique, integrated approach to the practice of the various healing grow-thing arts.

There are various ways of categorizing contemporary psychotherapies. I find it most meaningful to divide the many approaches into five major categories or streams.(2) Each stream includes a variety of different therapies. The streams overlap at many points. Some of the therapies can be placed logically in more than one stream. But in spite of these problems, I see this schema as a useful way of identifying the major thrusts within contemporary therapies.

Growth Counseling draws on insights and methods from all five streams but more heavily from the last three. Viewing all five streams from the growth perspective heightens aware-ness of how they complement, balance, and enrich one another in many ways as well as how they are in conflict in other ways. Here, then, is an overview of the five streams that will be explored from the growth perspective in this book.

Stream 1: Traditional Insight-oriented Therapies. This stream includes the vast majority of therapies developed before the last fifteen years. The stream began with the seminal work of Freud, around the turn of this century, and includes the many variations on the psycho-analytic-insight model of therapy. Many of these traditional therapies are "contemporary" in that they are still used widely today. Strictly speaking, they are not "growth therapies," but they must be considered in this book because they provide crucial insights that illuminate the dynamics of the depth dimension of personality and of deeply diminished growth. In the first four chapters of this book I will highlight some growth resources from a variety of these traditional therapies.

Stream 2: Behavior/Action/Crisis Therapies. This stream includes a cluster of diverse therapies linked by the common assumption that maladaptive learning is the cause of pro-blems of living and that behavioral and/or cognitive relearning is the heart of effective ther-apy. In chapter 5, I will highlight some growth resources from several behavior therapies.

Stream 3: Human Potentials Therapies. This stream includes those therapies whose explicit goal is the actualizing of persons' full potentialities. From among these therapies I will dis-cuss (in chapters 6, 7, and 8) three that have influenced my understanding and practice most --transactional analysis, gestalt therapy, and the body therapies.

Stream 4: Relational/Systems/Radical Therapies. This stream includes a variety of therapies that focus on changing social systems so that all their members will be freer to grow to-ward wholeness. The stream includes therapies utilizing ad hoc therapy groups, growth gro-ups, and self-help groups as well as those which seek to enable healing and growth in natural groups such as families. From among this cluster of therapies I will highlight growth resources from family therapies (in chapter 9) and from feminist therapies (in chapter 10). Feminist therapies are "radical" therapies in that they aim at both personal growth and social change.

Stream 5: Spiritual Growth Therapies. This stream consists of those therapies which regard spiritual growth as central .and essential in all healing and growth. The Jungian and existentialist therapies (see chapter 4) are a part of this stream. From this stream, I will ex-plore (in chapter II) the remarkable growth resources in psychosynthesis, which is also a human potentials therapy. The stream also includes pastoral counseling and psychotherapy (which incorporate healing-growthing resources from the Hebrew-Christian tradition) and the Eastern approaches to enhancing consciousness which have many parallels with Western psychotherapies.

For Further Exploration of Growth Counseling

Clinebell, Charlotte H. (This was the author's name when she wrote this book. Subsequently she chose a new name, Charlotte Ellen). Counseling for Liberation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976. Explores counseling and consciousness-raising as methods of liberating women-men relationships.

Clinebell, Howard. Growth Counseling: Hope-Centered Methods of Actualizing Human Wholeness. Nashville: Abingdon, 1979. Discusses the theory, methods, and theology of Growth Counseling.

---Growth Counseling: New Tools for Clergy and Laity. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1973, 1974. Fifteen do-it-yourself cassette training courses for learning Growth Counseling techniques. Part I -- "Enriching Marriage and Family Life"; Part II -- "Coping Constructively with Crises."

---Growth Counseling for Marriage Enrichment: Pre-Marriage and the Early Years. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. Applies the growth counseling approach to marriage enrichment, particularly during the preparation and early stages.

---Growth Counseling for Mid-Years Couples. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977. Marriage enrichment and counseling methods for the mid years.

---Growth Groups. Nashville: Abingdon, 1977. Spells out the growth-group approach

and applies it to marriage and family enrichment, creative singlehood, youth work, women's and men's liberation, social problems.

Goble, Frank. The Third Force: The Psychology of Abraham Maslow. New York: Pocket Books, 1971. A systematic overview of Maslow's basic theory.

Gould, Roger L. Transformations, Growth and Change in Adult Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. Describes growthful ways of coping with adult life crises.

Maslow, Abraham H. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Explores health and pathology, creativeness, values, education, and transcendence.

---Religions, Values and Peak Experiences. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964. Discusses transcendental experiences, the split between science and religion, hope and values in education.

Toward a Psychology of Being, 2nd ed. New York: Van Nostrand, 1968. A classic statement of Maslow's growth-oriented psychology.

Miller, Jean Baker. Toward a New Psychology of Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976. Describes how growth is stifled by sexism and how sexism can be overcome.

Otto, Herbert A., ed. Human Potentialities: The Challenge and the Promise. St. Louis:Warren H. Green, 1968. A collection of papers by Gardner Murphy, Abraham Maslow, Charlotte Buhler, Clark Moustakas, Alexander Lowen, Herbert Otto, and others exploring human potentialities.

---and Mann, John, eds. The Ways of Growth: Approaches to Expanding Awareness. New York: Viking Press, 1968. A collection of nineteen papers describing a wide variety of methods for facilitating growth.

Schultz, Duane. Growth Psychology: Models of Healthy Personality. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977. Discusses the nature of wholeness in the thought of Allport, Rogers, Frornm, Maslow, Jung, Franki, and Peris.

Shostrom, Everett L. Actualizing Therapy. San Diego: Edits Publishers, 1976. A synthesis of growth concepts and methods from various psychotherapeutic approaches.

Notes

1. For an in-depth discussion of these principles see my Growth Counseling (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979), chapters I and 2.

2. I am building on Abraham Maslow's observation regarding the first, second, and third

forces in psychology. What he described as the "fourth force" -- transpersonal psychology -- is the fifth stream in my schema. (See Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being, 2nd ed. [New York: Van Nostrand, 1968], pp. iii-iv.)

Gregory’s Pastoral Care is the most influential book in the history of the pastoral tradition. In it he deals discretely with highly individualized remedies. Pastoral wisdom must listen intently to the unique characteristics of a situation and apply a specific remedy accordingly.

When dealing with a community of hearers, however, rather than counseling in one-on-one dialogue, the task of pastoral care becomes infinitely more volatile and hazardous. For in preaching, the pastor must deal simultaneously with persons of widely different needs, ploys, and passions.

To what degree can pastoral care meaningfully occur through preaching? Gregory’s basic maxim is still a useful guide, even though difficult to apply: An exhortation that is intended to be delivered to a general audience must be gauged in such a way that "virtues are fostered in each without encouraging the growth of vices opposed to such virtues."¹ This requires exceptional skill and preparation on the part of the speaker. Preachers must be aware of the diversity of persons in their congregation, yet try to speak so that the Spirit, through scripture, addresses many hearts in ways that will be fitting to each, as different as these hearers are known to be from one another.

In the last poignant section of his Pastoral Care Gregory provides a pithy summary of the complex balance needed to foster virtue without inadvertently encouraging vice. That section is worth reading, carefully and meditatively. It is reviewed as a concise and fitting summary to our lengthy expedition.

"Humility is to be preached to the proud in a way not to increase fear in the timorous, and confidence infused into the timorous, as not to encourage the unbridled impetuosity in the proud. The idle and the remiss are to be exhorted to zeal for good deeds, but in a way not to increase the unrestraint of intemperate action in the impetuous. Moderation is to be imposed on the impetuous without producing a sense of listless security in the idle. Anger is to be banished from the impatient, but so as not to add to the carelessness of the remiss and easy-going. The remiss should be fired with zeal in such a manner as not to set the wrathful ablaze."²

Such preaching prays to be enlivened by the Spirit that it may reach its precise targets.

Indeed pastoral care can and must be attempted through preaching: "Good things are so to be preached as not to give incidental help to what is bad."³ More than fleshly wisdom or human cleverness is required if one is to encourage a balance of behavioral excellences without eliciting new behavioral deficits. Gregory’s dialectical balance is exquisite: "The highest good is to be so praised that the good in little things is not discarded. Attention should be called to the little things, but not in such a way that they are deemed sufficient and there is no striving for the highest."⁴

The pastor in public communication continues to care for souls publicly but within a communication context that differs from that of individual dialogue. The problem of pastoral preaching becomes even more complicated when you realize that any one of those hearers may experience inwardly contrary passions at any given time. This makes the public task of care of souls through preaching challenging and exacting. Gregory compares pastoral preaching to an act of wrestling — deftly dodging quickly this move and that ploy while trying to get in a telling move at exactly the right time.⁵

Gregory’s idea of pastoral preaching hinges on his notion of contrary compulsions. The hearer who is temperamentally optimistic and ordinarily self-affirming will at certain times become deeply depressed, overwhelmed with sadness. The pastor’s problem in public communication is to offer encouragement that takes into account the pain yet will not link easily with false optimism.

The plot thickens, however, when the pastoral preacher realizes that other parishioners sitting in the same congregation have their own distinctive sets of ambivalent tendencies and passions. Such individuals may be plagued with inordinate hastiness, always running around with high anxiety levels; yet on certain occasions, when they need to do something quickly, they may be suddenly gripped by fear. The pastoral preacher tries to assist the person suffering from those two distinguishable psychological syndromes — which Gregory terms precipitancy and anxiety. The pastor hopes that the hurriedness can be diminished, but without thereby intensifying the anxieties. In speaking with such a precipitously anxious person, the pastor is also aware of the selfaffirming optimist in the next pew, who suffers from an entirely different set of contrary compulsions.

In confronting this perennial problem in the care of souls Gregory again turns to a medical analogy: Sometimes a person who has a constitutionally weak body experiences a violent illness that requires a drastic remedy. If the body cannot endure the strong remedy, the doctor must treat the violent illness in such a way that the fatigue and weakness of the body is not increased. This may require the application of treatments that are ironically working in opposite directions. You are trying both to counteract the violent illness and the fatigue at one and the same time — in due Proportion, as the body is able to take on two different, even countermanding, treatments. This is the hazardous ground over which the care of souls must at times warily proceed. When a person suffers from distinctly contrary compulsions, the care given may be analogous to that involved in giving highly refined doses of medication. It calls for a subtle timing sequence that can help the person actually take one administrable treatment in due course while delaying another unadministrable treatment in hopes that the conflicting treatments do not become worse than the illness itself.⁶

It is for this reason that sometimes a smaller compulsion may be temporarily disregarded in order that the greater and more dangerous compulsion can be pastorally treated. Suppose an individual has two major contrary compulsions, one of which is mildly dangerous, and the other of which is gravely dangerous. Would not pastors then be justified in allowing the lesser problem to increase if, in doing so, they are able to work significantly on the more severe compulsion that conceivably could cause something worse?

It is not unusual therefore to find pastoral care "overlooking what was mildly wrong," in order to take seriously what matters more urgently.⁷ Effective pastoral care must be free to exercise a kind of tolerance for vice, allowing a certain compulsion to continue while deliberately reducing another more dangerous one.⁸

Should pastors always tell a person the whole truth, or should they withhold the truth at times when it cannot possibly be assimilated? Gregory argues that the application of truth in pastoral situations must be explicitly gauged to the capacity of the hearer to grasp the truth; otherwise the truth can be dangerously ill-timed. He compares the pastor’s approach in this connection to the string of a violin that must be tuned to exactly the right pitch. Too loose, the string sounds flat; too tight, it may snap. There is a danger in offering to weak and unprepared souls the most profound truth at the wrong time. Such was the dilemma that caused Paul to write to the congregation at Corinth: "For my part, my brothers, I could not speak to you as I should speak to people who have the Spirit. I had to deal with you on the merely natural plane, as infants in Christ. And so I gave you milk to drink, instead of solid food, for which you were not ready" (I Cor. 3:1-2).

Gregory thought that the pastor is responsible for even inadvertent use of language. By negligence, the pastor remains responsible for things said inaccurately or accidentally. "When a man removes the cover of a well or digs a well and leaves it uncovered, then if an ox or an ass falls into it, the owner of the well shall make good the loss" (Exod. 21:33). Similarly, if we are negligent in speech, if we leave behind us a hazardous, uncovered well, then if someone falls in and is injured, we are responsible.

Where one’s footsteps go is a truer indication than where one’s words go. Rather than relying exclusively upon words, as if they were in themselves the sole agency of pastoral care, it is better to view one’s deeds as basic proclamation. Inevitably the parishioner will see through language to its actual correspondence with behavior.

The seriousness with which Gregory himself took this maxim is revealed in the concluding comment of his Pastoral Care, where he sighs:

"I, miserable painter that I am, have painted a portrait of an ideal man; and here I have been directing others to the shore of perfection, I, who am still tossed about on the waves of sin. But in the shipwreck of this life, sustain me I beseech you, with the plank of your prayers, so that, as my weight is sinking me down, you may uplift me with your meritorious hand."⁹

NOTES:

1. PC 3.36.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. PC 3.37.

7. PC 3.38.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

As Gregory’s dipolar method of pastoral case studies proceeds, each case seems to increase in complexity and deepen in pathos. The cases become more subtle and more heavily laden with irony as Gregory reveals the inner stresses of specific situations of counsel.

Although space limitations will not allow us to cover all these dipolarities, in this chapter we will select several prototype cases to examine in some detail. We are interested in revealing both Gregory’s theological method of pastoral practice and the rudiments of his actual procedure of situational pastoral counsel.

Winners and Losers

Both life’s winners and losers come to the pastor for help. Those who seem to live a charmed existence and to succeed in everything they do are to be pastorally guided in a direction that prevents them from becoming the victims of their own prosperity. They may need a gentle reminder that their success is not an unambiguous reward for virtue; rather, each new achievement stands as a challenge to learn to do good on that level of accomplishment or proficiency.¹

Gregory thought that pastoral instruction to overachievers had already been anticipated by the Apostle Paul, who reminded his aggressive Corinthian flock that all historical achievements must be viewed eschatologically: "What I mean my friends is this. The time we live in will not last long. While it lasts, married men should be as if they had no wives; mourners should be as if they had nothing to grieve them, the joyful as if they did not rejoice; buyers must not count on keeping what they buy nor those who use the world’s wealth on using it to the full. For the whole frame of this world is passing away" (1 Cor. 7:29-31). The point is not that persons should avoid buying or marrying or rejoicing but that each of these limited goods is to be viewed in relation to the source of all goods and received in due proportion, not be made absolute. If you buy something, live free from the illusion that you will always have possession of it. Use it "as if" you did not possess it, but only temporarily had stewardship of it. These are pertinent learnings for the person who is spoiled by success, who has not yet learned to deal with poverty or loss.²

A very different sort of pastoral counsel is needed, however, for those who have repeatedly made earnest attempts but never achieved their fondest goals. If they experience themselves always as losers, they may become wearied by the erosions of adversity. What sort of pastoral response is needed? They need most deeply to grasp that God has not given up on them. Two analogies apply: "When a physician gives up hope for a patient, he allows him to have whatever he fancies; but a person whose cure he deems possible is forbidden much that he desires. We take money away from our children yet at the same time reserve for them, as our heirs, the whole patrimony."³ The ironic point for the loser is that if you are now suffering from adversity only then can you be certain that the Lord has not given up on you. The same point is powerfully made by Kierkegaard in his Christian Discourses.⁴ The person who thinks himself a perennial loser needs the pastor’s encouragement to be enabled to use those very circumstances of adversity for learning, spiritual growth, and discipline.

The Married and the Single

Those who think of marriage counseling as an exclusively modern phenomenon may be surprised to read that Gregory counsels those who are married to "study to please" their sexual partner.⁵ Partners in marriage are above all counseled "to bear with mutual patience the things in which they sometimes displease each other"⁶ (cf. Gal. 6:2). Gregory advises each marriage partner to think less on what one is forced to endure from one’s spouse and more on what one’s spouse is required to endure from oneself: "If one considers what is endured from one’s self, that which is endured from another is more easily borne."⁷

Gregory’s key to marriage counsel comes directly from Paul:

The husband must give the wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give the husband his due. The wife cannot claim her body as her own; it is her husband’s. Equally the husband cannot claim his body as his own; it is his wife’s. Do not deny yourselves to one another, except when you agree on a temporary abstinence (I Cor. 7:3-5).

Marriage is not to be undertaken simply as a hedonic exercise to increase individual pleasure, without the sense of mutual accountability to one another, yet through this accountability the pleasing of one another is increased.⁸

Gregory strongly affirmed the freedom of the single state which he himself had chosen as a life-style. He does not share the often prevalent assumption that marriage is normative for mental health or necessary for the good life. He was convinced that the marital relationship involves the undertaking of an extraordinary responsibility that can potentially turn one away from God. Yet Gregory does not deprecate marriage, he even echoes Paul’s dictum: "Better be married than burn with vain desire" (1 Cor. 7:9). Nonetheless, if one remains unmarried, one need not assume that one is psychologically incomplete or morally limited or spiritually incapacitated.

Suppose a parishioner is unmarried and yet has been involved in affairs, perhaps even deeply enmeshed and burned by relationships of intimacy, and is struggling with the guilt that so often comes from such entanglements. Gregory’s pastoral counsel is hardly prudish. One should not assume that any sin is beyond the range of God, for "the life of one burning with love after having sinned is more pleasing to God than a life of innocence that grows languid in its sense of security."⁹ Jesus made the same point sharply in his parable of the lost sheep: "I tell you there will be greater joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who do not need to repent" (Luke 15:7).

Gregory took special note of the woman who, having lived a wild life, brought oil of myrrh in a small flask, wetted Jesus’ feet with tears, wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with the myrrh. When the Pharisees said that he should reject this evil woman, Jesus said: "I tell you her great love proves that her many sins have been forgiven; when little has been forgiven, little love is shown" (Luke 7:36-50). The penitent adulterer is like land with thorns in it: "We love land that produces abundant fruit when its thorns are plowed in, more than land that has no thorns but which, though cultivated, yields a barren harvest."10

The Gluttonous and the Ascetic

Some eat to excess and others do not eat enough. Since the body is God’s gift, to be properly cared for, eating enough but not too much is an appropriate concern of Christian counsel. The pastor from time to time will be called upon to give one kind of spiritual counsel to the gluttonous and another kind to the abstemious.¹¹

You must not deal with both of these cases in the same way, Gregory warned. Paul realized that the abstemious may need to "use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake, for thine often infirmities" (I Tim. 5:23, KJV), whereas those more prone to gluttony may need to "abstain from meats" (1 Tim. 4:3 KJV). The pastor needs wisdom to know the difference between the former’s need to relax constraints and the latter’s need for disciplined selfconstraint.

Gluttony is as much a spiritual as a bodily problem. Gregory’s recurrent symbol for intemperate use of food is our first parents grabbing the forbidden fruit even when it was unmistakably prohibited. What do the gluttonous need? Although Gregory knew little about the physiology of heart disease, he grasped accurately the connection between long-term gluttony and the risk of sudden death. He quoted Jesus’ injunction: "Keep a watch on yourselves; do not let your minds be dulled by dissipation and drunkenness and worldly cares so that the great Day closes upon you suddenly like a trap" (Luke 2 1:36).

Yet in the process of counseling persons in this direction one must carefully guard against the possibility that "in fleeing from the vice of gluttony worse vices are not generated."¹² Gluttony is not worse than the pride that may accompany its defeat.

He then turned to the opposite problem — excessive abstemiousness. Those who, perhaps out of some earnest motive, abstain too much from food may elicit new vices of excess, such as harshly judging others’ motives. Paul rightly observed that the one who "does not eat must not pass judgment on the one who does" (Rom. 14:3). Like the Pharisees who boasted of fasting (Luke 18:12), the abstemious may be reinforcing egocentric pride over their abstinence.¹³ Jesus warned that one is "not defiled by what goes into his mouth, but by what comes out of it" (Matt. 15:11).

The Protector ad the Competitor

In any social organization there are some who are given responsibilities to care for and supply necessities to others, while others who are in a dependency position are called to receive what is given. The family is the most obvious example. Some give, some receive, each according to their capacity to give and receive. This principle of equity applies not only to parents of children, but also to leaders of any organization, administrators of any process, providers for any group. Some are charged with providing necessities for others. These persons can easily elicit anxiety or give offense and incur needless guilt if their ordering of resources is unwise, unjust, ill-conceived, or poorly administered.¹⁴

Gregory proceeds through a long list of the perennial problems of the givers and protectors, those whose social role is to provide care for others. They may be inclined toward moral conceit in which they "rate themselves above others on whom they bestow earthly goods."¹⁵ They may be dilatory, through penuriousness or tightness inordinately delaying to give what is needed. They may give to some persons who rightly should not be given anything. They may give with an inordinate expectation of receiving thanks. They may give morosely so as to take away others’ joy in receiving. Protectors and parent surrogates "must not esteem themselves to be better just because they see that others are supported by them."¹⁶ The pastor will help them grasp that what they are dispensing actually belongs to others, and that it is truly just that the others should receive it. That the dependent receives goods is not a moral deficiency, nor is it a moral virtue to be in the role of dispenser.

If under the guise of liberality they "scatter uselessly what they have," pastoral counsel may need to focus more intently on the need for conservation of resources and for equitable distribution. But suppose the opposite is the case: they delay endlessly; they do not give enough. In this case Paul had to say that one who "sows sparingly will also reap sparingly" (2 Cor. 9:6, RSV). The benefactor is being called to give neither too much nor too little but to discover due proportion in giving a fit and equitable amount, responsive to the competing claims of ever-changing human needs.¹⁷ If beneficence is accompanied by a moroseness that silently signals the recipient that it is a very heavy task indeed for the giver to provide, the touchstone of pastoral counsel is "God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Cor. 9:7, RSV).

The responsible protector, the person who is placed in the position of caring for others, is tempted in either of two directions — to give too little to one to whom something legitimately should be given, or to give too much to one who has less right to receive. In the former case the giver needs the injunction found in Luke 6:30: "Give to everyone who asks." In the latter case the person tempted to provide too liberally, even to those who have no legitimate needs, must be helped to realize that undue giving can reinforce dependency patterns.

Gregory makes a stunning point on the ambiguities of giving to those derelicts among the poor who are by consensus generally regarded as less worthy: One should give not just to the unworthy poor, but also to the worthy poor, regardless of their moral condition, and for a profound reason: because one "gives of his bread to an indigent sinner, not because he is a sinner, but because he is a man. In doing so one actually nourishes a righteous beggar, not a sinner, for he loves in him not his sin but his nature."¹⁸

Gregory sharply warned those with ample possessions not to imagine that they can put righteousness up for sale or sin with impunity while they deceive themselves into thinking that gifts to the poor will make up for their own sin. For he who "bestows food or raiment on the poor, yet is stained with wickedness in his soul or body, offers the lesser to righteousness and the greater to sin," for in giving to God his possessions he abandons his soul to death.¹⁹

An entirely different sort of pastoral counsel is appropriate for those acquisitive, competitive persons who are not looking after someone else’s resources but trying only to acquire more resources for themselves. Gregory refers especially to those acquisitive people who tend toward opportunism or avarice, who are inclined to seize whatever they can at whatever cost to the other person in order to increase their own power or wealth or influence. Such tough, self-expansive, overly assertive persons may need to hear a tough-minded prognosis from scripture, which the pastor must find a way to say, as did the prophet Habakkuk: "Woe betide you who heap up wealth that is not yours and enrich yourself with goods taken in pledge! Will not your creditors suddenly start up, will not all awake who would shake you until you are empty, and will you not fall a victim to them?" (Hab. 2:6-7). Isaiah said straight out: "Shame on you! You who add house to house and join field to field, until not an acre remains, and you are left to deal alone in the land" (Isa. 5:8). The implication is that if you keep on expanding your power inordinately against the interest of others, then you may fail to see the hidden connection between your own interests and other persons’ interests. Since you cannot learn to live with other people in this world, you may then have to experience painful loneliness as another sort of teacher. This is a damning correlation that the compulsively competitive person had better understand sooner rather than later. ²⁰

Like John Chrysostom before him, Gregory argued that one who "loves money can never have enough" (Eccl. 5:10). Avarice can never be really satisfied.²¹ The more the covetous invest their love in money, the more frustrated they will be in seeing that they will not be able to reap the fruit of happiness from it. One who makes haste to be rich will seldom be innocent (Prov. 28:20; 20:21). Jesus asked poignantly: "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Matt. 16:26, KJV).

Gregory proposed a specific approach to the counsel of the compulsively withholding person who says: "I’ve done nothing wrong, I’m not hurting anybody. I’m just holding on to what I have." Such a person needs tactfully to be instructed that charity for the poor is not merely an act of mercy but also a matter of justice: "When we administer necessities to the needy, we give them what is their own, not what is ours, we pay a debt of justice, rather than do a work of mercy."²² To the compulsive withholder Gregory retells the story of the barren fig tree: It did not harm anybody else, but it did in fact take up ground (Luke 13:7). The axe will be laid to such a tree, as John the Baptist remarked, if it does not produce fruit (Luke 3:9).

Sometimes lavish gifts are offered with a great show of outward rectitude. Gregory does not miss the opportunity to point out that the virtue of liberality may parade outwardly while it disguises the vice of avarice. Most pastors know parishioners who "carefully weigh what is the amount which they give, but neglect to consider how much they seize."²³ Gregory compared avarice with an overgrown plant that needs to be pruned. If you do not cut it regularly and carefully, it will grow unmanageably. The energies of self-assertive competition need to be curbed so that we may come to recognize the rights of others. Pastoral counsel seeks to do some of this timely pruning, reducing the tendency of avarice to grow wildly. The assumed joys of possession may become embittered by the poison of avarice. The avaricious cannot honestly "offer to God what they withdraw from the needy."²⁴ If you steal from the poor and offer stolen goods as a sacrifice to God, what is that like to God? It is like one who offers to sacrifice another man’s son in the presence of his father (Sir. 34:20), an unendurable offense.

The Actively Guilty and the Passively Guilty

Those feeling guilt over willed misdeeds are treated differently than those who project fantasies of guilt beyond their willing. This important pastoral distinction is difficult to make and needs a general rule to guide its application. For those grieving over real guilt for actual misdeeds, Gregory hypothesizes that three stages are required for a return to moral health — penitence, pardon, and reparation. The pastoral intention must be to help keep the remorse or regret in due proportion to the values that have actually been negated.

It is appropriate that persons should first experience remorse and the struggle of conscience over unjust actions. The pastor must not try to protect persons from the witness of their own conscience and from going through a reasonable period of keen awareness of lost values.²⁵ During this process it is fitting that these losses should be felt before God and in the presence of God’s holiness. The prototype of the penitential prayer is Psalm 51: "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned" (vv. 3, 4, RSV). Pastoral listening cannot cheaply reduce the pain of standing before God in the remembrance of these losses.

But pastoral care does not end with moral sympathy; it continues, in the second place, with the proclamation of forgiveness, for the next pivotal movement of consciousness is the acceptance of divine pardon. Pastoral care, when effective, brings one articulately, clearly, and directly into the presence of divine mercy. The pastor must learn how to use human speech to declare the divine address. The aim is to assist the hearer in trusting God’s forgiving Word and resting serenely in it. The parishioner who cannot meaningfully experience this deep dimension of forgiveness may fall into a habit that Gregory calls "immoderate affliction"²⁶ — forever overemphasizing one’s deficits, always being too hard on oneself, seemingly making it impossible for God to forgive.

Pastoral care of the guilty proceeds, however, with still a third step that is not to be taken lightly — an appropriate act of reparation for wrongs done. Having once rested confidently in God’s forgiveness, a new danger lurks, namely, that one will too readily assume that God will always forgive. This might tend to reinforce the temptation to do the same things over again, or worse. It would be to use God’s pardon as an excuse for sinful self-assertion, turning God’s unmerited mercy into "baneful reassurance."²⁷

Yet every pastor knows that some people are inordinately burdened with guilt feelings. When these guilt feelings are carefully examined, they focus upon nothing that the individual has actually done but upon diffuse social guilt or felt corporate guilt, based on actions that were partially or wholly out of one’s own hands. In some cases guilt adheres only to fantasized misdeeds that have been mentally conceived or imaginatively projected. Guilt in some cases is directed only to something one has thought of doing yet not actually done. Gregory would carefully guide such persons through a discriminating act of self-examination in order to sort out the degree of their own willingness to consent to a harmful deed. This exercise centers upon ascertaining the extent to which one would have given free consent to an overtly evil act had one been given full opportunity.

This self-examination is based on a clearly delineated psychology of will that Gregory had learned from earlier church fathers (Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine) but had himself developed and refined.²⁸ According to this psychology, the dynamics of guilt and self-alienation occur in three distinguishable stages, analogous to the fall of Adam. Stage one: A suggestion of sin is made. Stage two: one then thinks about the imagined pleasure that would accompany the misdeed. Stage three: one freely consents — one wills to do it. Even if one wills to punch a neighbor in the nose, however, one may still have to wait for the opportunity. Hence the crucial determination as to whether one has actually consented, stage three, may require deliberate and detailed self-examination.²⁹

The psychological dynamics of this examination are further complicated by the fact that any of these three stages may be further enmeshed in a triadic collusion between (1) our flesh, which is already prone to sin, (2) a superpersonal demonic power, "the enemy," and (3) our own will, fully determined by us. In the last analysis it is only our will or spirit that can consent. Therefore only the will can sin. The body or flesh in itself has neither freedom or consent. By suggestion and temptation the demonic forces, Gregory hypothesized, were incessantly trying to lure the human will away from God. The flesh anticipates the imagined pleasure that might accompany a misdeed. Yet that in itself is not sin but only its precondition. At that point one may or may not give consent. It is the actual consent for which one is duly responsible. Parishioners are asked carefully to examine into which of these degrees of complicity they have fallen. The first and second degrees of complicity may carry some level of culpability, but finally one can sin only with one’s own will. The psychological principle: the further one has actually gone toward freely willing a misdeed, the greater is the need for penitence, pardon, reparation, and reconciliation with God and neighbor.³⁰

However far toward willing consent one may have gone, pastoral guidance nevertheless wishes to show that the divine pardon is immediately available to the truly penitent. The one who earnestly and actively prays for reconciliation can be confident that forgiveness is immediate and not delayed.³¹

Feigned Penitence and Penance Without Restitution

Feigned penitent acts are in vain if they do not manifest themselves in seriously attempted behavioral changes. Bathing in tears does not suffice. Gregory employs the devastating analogy of a sow who, taking "a bath in its muddy wallow. . . makes itself even filthier."³² Those who pretend to be trying to change their behavior while pleading with God for forgiveness yet go right back to the muddy wallow are opening themselves up to an even greater deception — the mocking of God’s pardon. The purpose of washing is to become clean. You may as well not take a bath in the first place if you intend immediately to plunge back into the mud. That amounts to thumbing one’s nose at divine mercy.

Suppose you are called into court and plead with the judge for pardon. You gain the pardon, walk right out of the court room, and blatantly do again precisely the wrong for which you had previously asked to be pardoned. Does that not show contempt of the judge?³³ It is no easy matter to change such a steady disposition for evil. Those who are by strong predisposition morally evil "are moved in vain by compunction to righteousness, just as, for the most part, good are tempted to sin without harm."³⁴

The pastor will meet those parishioners who will "Do some part of a good deed without completing it," yet remain unduly confident that they have in fact done it already, and only when they will find the regrettable side of their intention manifesting itself, will they become naively surprised. Paul grasped the dynamics of this inner dividedness in this memorable way: "In my inmost self I delight in the law of God, but I perceive that there is in my bodily parts a different law, fighting against the law which my reason approves and makes me a prisoner under the law that is in my members, the law of sin" (Rom. 7:22ff.). On this assumption, the pastor does well to examine not only the initial expression of regret over guilt, but beyond that whatever long-term behavior patterns may follow after it. Gregory’s analysis is largely consistent with modern behavior modification theory and behavior therapy that focuses on actual, regularized, visible, even measurable, behavior change more than the hidden mysteries of supposed intentionality.³⁵

Is reparation required? Gregory takes the case of a parishioner who, let us suppose, having at one point grossly sinned, has now completely desisted from that sin and yet does not wish to go through any semblance of an awkward or embarrassing act of penitence before God for past misdeeds. Inwardly the person is saying, "I’m not trapped there any more. Why do I need to repent?"

Gregory answers with three amusing analogies: a bad poem, an unpaid debt, and an unretrieved insult.³⁶ Suppose I write a very bad poem and then decide to give up writing. That does not efface what I have written just because I am not adding anything to it.

Suppose a person has gotten deeply into debt, but now has decided that he is not going to incur any more debts. That does not mean that all previous debts have been paid off. It simply means that no new debts are being incurred. The debtor still needs to pay off those old debts.

Suppose I insult you and then I say, "I am not going to insult you anymore." My being quiet does not make reparation for the earlier insult. I must go further than that.

Similarly, if it is God before whom we stand, "we certainly do not make reparation merely by ceasing from evil."³⁷ A further active step is needed — from penitence and pardon to the new life that emerges from it. One does not just undergo baptism and then do nothing, for baptism rehearses not only the death of an old life but also the rising to a new life.³⁸

Those who frequently commit small misdeeds are to be counseled in a different way than those who sink into a grave sin only once in their life or very rarely. Frequent irresponsibilities are compared to tiny rain drops: if you get enough of them, they can cause a flood. It is something like a bee sting: one sting does not hurt much, but a thousand can destroy life as completely as a single rapier thrust to the heart. If bilge water is slowly and inconspicuously rising in a ship, and no one notices its continued rising, it has the same devastating effect as if a hurricane threw the ship on the rocks and dashed it to pieces. Thus, if you neglect these small incremental matters of behavioral deficit and minor excess, you may in time be lured into larger self-deceptions and collusions that will spell disaster.

This is the precise problem of the small misdeed — it fosters a lack of concern. One becomes inured to its consequences. One imagines that it is nothing at all. It is powerful only because it is small. Pastoral counsel will try to unpack the correlation between the raindrop and the impending flood, the bee sting and the death, the slowly rising water and the potential disaster.³⁹

On the other side of the fence there is the individual who lives a solemnly upright life, whose small sins are carefully monitored, yet who suddenly finds himself in the midst of an unexpectedly grave sin. The prototype of this behavioral pattern is the legalist of whom Jesus wryly spoke, who filters his wine to get rid of a gnat, but then gulps down a camel (Matt. 23:24). Such persons discern trifles. They are clear about where the tiniest deficits lie. They tithe mint and cumin, the least of all of the herbs, yet forget the weightier matters of law, judgment, and mercy — and faith (Matt. 23:23). Overattentiveness to the small misdeed may contribute to the neglect of the large. To this is added pride, conceit, and a lethargy that comes from spiritual elation, an ecstatic awareness that assumes: "Aren’t we wonderful!"⁴⁰

The Nonstarter and the Nonfinisher

Gregory’s next bipolar case study distinguishes between (1) one who never gets started on a good project, and (2) one who tends always to start things but never finish them. What pastor has not met both characters working together on the same committee!

The nonstarter must be pastorally assisted to see what values this syndrome is yielding and what it is losing. This may require a tough-minded pastoral encounter that penetrates pretense, absurdity, and immobility. One does not appeal verbally to the person merely to start doing something. You cannot plant until you first clear away weeds. "One who does not feel the pain of a wound will not seek any healing remedy."⁴¹ The person who is infinitely tardy in getting started on an improved life-plan should be first shown the dire consequences that may ensue from the direction being pursued. Only then may one learn how good are the values one may now be disregarding.⁴² On this basis a definite long-range plan may be pastorally commended. Gregory notes that the first act in construction of a house ironically may be an act of destruction — to cut down a tree. By analogy, the first step in getting started toward constructive change may be the painful negation of a dysfunctional pattern.

The case stands differently with those who never seem to complete any attempted good that they have begun. Here persistence is the soul of counsel: "The human soul is like a ship going up stream; it is not allowed to stay still in one place, because it will drop away to the lower reaches unless it strives to gain the upper."⁴³ The care of souls is like guiding a ship going up stream. The current is strong. One must work against the current all the time in order to make even the slightest progress. The instant you relax a step in your overall plan, you are already drifting downstream. This frustration must have been felt in the Church of Sardis to whom it was written: "Wake up, and put some strength into what is left, which must otherwise die! For I have not found any work of yours completed in the eyes of my God. So remember the teaching you received; observe it, and repent" (Rev. 3:1-3). This is not an unusual pastoral situation. The pastor is called to specifically teach persons how to complete what they have begun, so as not inadvertently to destroy hard-won goods that now exist but are vulnerable to erosion.⁴⁴

An Especially Subtle Case

The secret evildoer and the anonymous do-gooder constitute the last pair of Gregory’s bipolar cases. They present an especially subtle and intricate pastoral problem.

A unique pastoral task concerns the parishioner who inclines to do good openly while doing evil secretly.⁴⁵ Suppose you have a parishioner who has a wide public reputation for generosity, liberality, and mercy, yet secretly is doing something despicable. Such a person needs a special type and quality of pastoral admonition.

The most crucial learning to be sought in such a situation is the recognition of the fundamental difference between human judgments and divine judgment: that human achievements pass quickly while only the divine judgment is eternal and penetrates everything hidden. Ultimately, according to Gregory, each soul faces final divine judgment. All secret things will be revealed. The pastor does not do the parishioner a favor by withholding teaching about this final judgment. Jesus himself focused intently on this element in his pastoral care:

Be careful not to make a show of your religion before men; if you do. no reward awaits you in your Father’s house in heaven. Thus, when you do some act of charity, do not announce it with a flourish of trumpets, as the hypocrites do in synagogue and in the streets to win admiration from men. I tell you this: They have their reward already. No; when you do some act of charity, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing; your good deed must be secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you" (Matt. 6:1-4).

The other side of this bipolar case study was for Gregory more complex, delicate, and intriguing. Suppose you have a parishioner who is prone to do good, but insists on doing that good in secret. Suppose this parishioner is even willing to allow another person openly to think badly of him or her so as to hide the good deed, deliberately concealing from everyone’s view the good that has been done. Such a parishioner needs a very different kind of pastoral care than that given the secret evildoer. The anonymous benefactor is to be commended for taking seriously Jesus’ teaching to avoid doing good works in order to be seen and approved by other people.

But it is possible that a good behavioral maxim may be carried too far. Gregory straightforwardly counseled such anonymous doers of good that they "should not love their neighbors less than themselves"!⁴⁶ If in every case you withhold edification from others by concealing the good you do, then nobody else can ever possibly enjoy, emulate, or benefit from that good work. This is why Jesus proclaimed:

You are light for all the world. A town that stands on a hill cannot be hidden. When a lamp is lit, it is not put under the meal-tub, but on the lamp-stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. And you, like the lamp, must shed light among your fellows, so that, when they see the good that you do, they may give praise to your Father in heaven (Matt. 5:14-16).

But how can it be consistently said on the one hand that we should allow other persons to see our good works (Matt. 5:16), and on the other hand that we should take heed that we do not do our good works in order to be seen by others (Matt. 6:1)? Gregory thinks that these two admonitions, properly understood, are not inconsistent: We are called to do good not in such a way as to be seen by others with a view to drawing to ourselves their praise, but in a way that allows others to see God’s love and constant mercy refracted through our behavior.⁴⁷ The key difference lies not in the realm of outward activity, but in the realm of inward motivation. It makes sense that, as we do outward good works, others be allowed to behold something of our inner motives for doing them, and of the positive effect of our hidden good motives — though the good deed is not to be done primarily in order to be outwardly observed by others. When others nonetheless behold our good deed, done openly, not for our own glory but for the well-being of our neighbor and the glory of God, they can then receive it, celebrate it, and imitate it. In this sense, good deeds should not be concealed, and, except in rare cases, persons should not carelessly allow evil to be attributed to them. Gregory argued that such persons have some responsibility even for the way others interpret their behavior. Why? Because every person’s behavior is at some level exemplary. Others may imitate what they perceive to be your behavior, even if they are inaccurate in their perception of it.⁴⁸

Gregory’s biblical prototype for thinking about this pastoral admonition is again Paul. In Corinth the question had arisen concerning the eating of food consecrated to heathen deities. Paul’s most eager hearers were saying, "Forget dietary rules. These are false gods." Paul agreed, yet added:

But not everyone knows this. There are some who have been so accustomed to heathen consecration, and their conscience, being weak, is polluted by the eating. Certainly food will not bring us into God’s presence: If we do not eat, we are none the worse, and if we eat, we are none the better. But be careful that this liberty of yours does not become a pitfall for the weak. If a weak character sees you sitting down to a meal in a heathen temple — you who ‘have knowledge’ — will not his conscience be emboldened to eat food consecrated to the heathen deity? This ‘knowledge’ of yours is utter disaster to the weak, the brother for whom Christ died. In thus sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience, you sin against Christ" (1 Corinthians 8).

In this way parishioners are counseled to be responsible, not only for their own actual behavior, but also for the way that behavior is perceived by others. Even if we are doing something good, others with weak conscience might perceive it as a stumbling block, the means of another’s downfall: in that case we are in some sense partly responsible for that stumbling.

Gregory summarizes his response to these two dipolar cases with this concise maxim: The pastor will help parishioners learn to do good deeds secretly insofar as they are motivated by the need for praise, but openly insofar as they become a means of the glorification of God and the edification of the neighbor.⁴⁹

NOTES:

1. PC 3.26.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Siren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940).

5. PC 2.27.

6. PC 3.27.

7. Ibid.

8. Cf. Siren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), vol. 2.

9. BPR 3.2.

10. PC 3.28.

11. PC 3.19.

12. Ibid.

13. BPR 3.19.

14. PC 3.20.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. BPR 3.20.

19. PC 3.20.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.; cf. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts, NPNF, 1st series, vol. 9.

22. PC 3.21.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. PC 3.29.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.; cf. Tertullian, On Penitence, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976); Jerome, NPNF, 2d series, vol. 6; Augustine, Confessions and Enchiridion, Library of Christian Classics, vol. 7 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953).

29. PC 3.29.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. PC 3.30.

33. Ibid.34. Ibid.

35. BPR 3.30.

36. PC 3.30.

37. Ibid.38. Ibid.

39. BPR 3.30.

40. PC 3.30.

41. PC 3.34.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. PC 3.35.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. BPR 3.35.

49. PC 3.35.

More explicitly than anyone else in the early pastoral tradition, Gregory the Great developed the theory and practice of contextual pastoral counseling. Its oft-repeated rudiments are found in the longest and most important section of his Pastoral Care, Book Three.

CONTEXTUAL COUNSELING

Having discussed readiness for ministry in Books One and Two, Gregory now turns to the interpersonal dynamics of pastoral conversation. His central question: How is the pastor to counsel or admonish (the Greek is nouthesia, the Latin, admonitio) those in his charge? Gregory’s main premise: What is helpful to one may be hurtful to another.

In developing this thesis, he plays with these analogies: "Herbs which nourish some animals are fatal to others. . . the medicine which abates one disease aggravates another."¹ This is the overarching "principle of variability" that Gregory of Nazianzus had earlier grasped² but which now was systematically developed for the first time by Gregory. It was destined to impact powerfully upon many subsequent interpreters of pastoral care.

A single unified core of doctrine was assumed by Gregory. He presupposed an accepted orthodoxy, a standard conception of correct ecumenical teaching of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Gregory insisted, however, that this unified teaching must always be accompanied by a variable practice of ministry that is constantly responsive to the changing personal needs and the here and now situation of the parishioner.

PASTORAL RESPONSE IN PARADOXICAL CASES

Gregory developed an intriguing series of paradoxical case studies of the diversities of pastoral counsel. He showed how dissimilar problems must be dealt with in subtly differentiated ways. To illustrate: The combative person cannot be approached in the same way as the meek character-type. The self-assertive spirit requires a form of pastoral treatment different from that needed by the self-effacing. Those who give resources liberally are to be counseled in a distinctly different way from those prone to covet or steal. The shy are treated differently than the loquacious.

The pastor works constantly within these polarities. The impatient person is treated differently than the person who is patient to a fault. Some so fear reprimand that they live their lives in comically compulsive correctness. They must be dealt with differently than those who have grown so hardened in aggressiveness that they can hardly even be penetrated by anyone’s reprimand. Similarly, the physically ill must be counseled in a different way than the healthy, males than females, poor than rich, employers than employees, and the overjoyed will receive different counsel than the depressed.³

Gregory’s case materials grow in complexity as he proceeds with his analysis of pastoral variables. Those who are fully conscious of their misdeeds and yet continue to do them must be pastorally dealt with differently than those who have discontinued doing misdeeds and yet remain largely unaware of their having changed. One who cannot take the first step in a change process must be dealt with pastorally in a different way than those who frequently start to make changes but never carry them through to completion. Some do good publicly and evil secretly; they must be counseled in a wholly different way than those who may be prone to conceal the good they do publicly yet allow others to think bad of them publicly. This is the principle of variability based on empathic listening to the specific situation of the parishioner.

All of these cases have one thing in common: God’s eternal corrective love must be communicated to each one amid widely varied personal circumstances. Gregory systematically examined the differences in specific care for persons in these variable circumstances. Each case is one side, or vector, of a sharply defined situational counseling wisdom. What follows is an exploration of a selection of several of these thirty-six polarities of pastoral response.⁴

The Timid and the Assertive

The pastor may deal at one moment with a painfully timid soul and then be met in the next moment by one who is boorishly assertive. The pastor needs to have enough skill in interpersonal analysis to be able to recognize the difference in these ploys. Each requires a distinct pastoral response.

Gregory clearly anticipated some forms of transactional analysis that were to develop fully only in the twentieth century. For example in an earlier study of interpersonal collusion in TAG: The Transaction Awareness Game,⁵ I described the way in which both assertiveness and timidity function within a particular grooving of interpersonal relationships which I called the "assertive channel," in which one person has developed the excellent behavior of modest, sensitive self-criticism yet tends thereby to move excessively in the direction of self-effacement whereas the other person in the collusion may have developed the excellent behavior of self-starting independence but with temptations to arrogance. Gregory had an extraordinarily clear intuitive awareness of such dynamics in his analysis of the pastoral care of the timid and the assertive.⁶

According to Gregory, overly assertive persons are not likely even to recognize the degree to which they are being pushy or boorish. It may require a determined counselor even to awaken them to the recognition that they are overplaying their hand. Conversely, the timid are likely to be already painfully aware of their own inadequacies, especially of the tendency to impinge on another’s territory or right. What is needed pastorally, according to Gregory, is not just supportive encouragement but also something like what we today would call assertiveness training. Gregory states this dipolar dialectic with exceptional accuracy: If assertive individualists need to recognize their tendencies to over-assertiveness, humble self-deniers need the opposite: to better grasp their low power position in order that they may offer to others more forthrightly what they are able to offer.⁷

Paul is viewed by Gregory as the pastoral prototype of one who could perform both types of contextual admonition in a well-integrated way. He could confront the aggressive individualist and increase the self-initiative of the overly timid without injuring the spiritual formation of either. He was quite capable of openly reprimanding the "foolish Galatians" who had become "bewitched" (Gal. 3:1, RSV), yet he responded quite empathically and supportively to the Philippians when they were already so painfully aware of their own inadequacies (Phil. 4: 10ff.). The haughty and disdainful obviously require a different sort of pastoral sensitivity from those who oppositely may be unduly despondent about their own inadequacies. This is because the former think of themselves as lacking little or nothing, while the latter think of themselves as endlessly unprepared and structurally lacking.⁸

Suppose you are dealing pastorally with one of the latter type, a person who is already trapped in down-dragging syndromes of self-abasement, faintheartedness, and failure of nerve. Here the pastor’s twofold procedure must be to "first praise that wherein he sees them to be strong, and afterwards, with cautious admonition, strengthen what was weak."⁹ Gregory’s biblical prototype for this is Paul’s counsel to Thessalonians who were inordinately anxious about the end time: "I beg you, do not suddenly lose your heads or alarm yourselves, whether at some oracular utterance, or pronouncement" (2 Thess. 2:2). Thus, Paul’s admonition for the timid was carefully linked with an assessment of their particular need for positive reinforcement and emotive support.

The Patient and the Impatient

Impatience is a special temptation of the powerful, who are forever inclined to underestimate the limits of their power. Submissive spinelessness is the peculiar vice of the accommodative parishioner whose virtue may tend toward an excessive patience that leads to immobility. In the pastoral office we often meet these two opposite types of parishioners. One will want instant compliance, while the other will be ready to comply immediately, looking frantically to others for guidance. These two persons, said Gregory, are to be counseled very differently.

Gregory offered a penetrating portraiture of the impatient person: agitated, not moving smoothly with time, always "ahead of time." Impetuosity often drives one toward precipitate actions. Many harmful secondary consequences come out of such impatience. When a consequent misdeed does occur, the impetuous individuals hurriedly fail to recognize its connection with their own impatience. This may cause them to undo what protracted labor had earlier accomplished, yet they hardly even recognize that it is their own impatience that has undone it.¹⁰

Such people need the kind of sensitive, straightforward pastoral care that can tactfully disclose to them precisely the moment when their impatience or agitation has precipitated undesirable secondary consequences for themselves and others. The key to the impatient character structure is that it tends inordinately to demand that everyone else comply quickly. Tempted always toward arrogance, the impatient are forever advertising themselves. They are often trying to manage an impression either of outward power or inward goodness. But they have not yet learned how to curb their self-assertive energies on behalf of others. Such persons are happy for good to be attributed to them, even if falsely.¹¹

What kind of pastoral counsel is indicated? The scripture, with the help of the Spirit, says Gregory, can counsel best, that one had "better govern one’s temper than capture a city" (Prov. 16:32). For to conquer a city is an external achievement, but to conquer oneself is a greater victory because it occurs within the sphere of freedom rather than through outward coercion. "In your patience possess ye your souls" (Luke 21:19, KJV), remarked Jesus. Gregory dwelt pensively upon the pastoral relevance of this text:

Reason must possess the soul in patience if the soul is properly to guide the active life. We dispossess ourselves of ourselves when we lack patience because we disavow the rational influencing or shaping of the soul so that the body has no choice but to follow after an impatient soul, and thereby "we lose the possession of what we are."¹² We can lose ourselves out of impatience. The good counselor tries contextually to teach this to the impatient person.

Impatience draws us into a turbulent pace. Like the fool, we utter anything and everything on our mind (Prov. 29:11). We say things too quickly, without interior discipline, missing what the wise know, namely, that time is going to take care of much that elicits anxiety. The wiser individual learns to defer gratification and temporarily to curb libidinal energies in order to gain greater happiness.¹³ This is why the wise are less exposed to the continuing hazards to which the impatient tend to be forever exposing themselves.

A very different type of pastoral counsel is needed for the person who may be patient to a fault. Patience is indeed a virtue, but all virtues are capable of being corrupted into vice. Patient people have their own hidden dilemmas. Having been patient under outward circumstances, they may be tempted inordinately to grieve over what they have suffered or missed. The limitation with which they have outwardly dealt patiently may have inwardly embittered them by the slow growth of suppressed indignation and resentment. They may become silently inflamed with bitterness.

Suppose the pastor is encountering just such a parishioner whose outward life has borne patiently with severe limitations, having often adjusted and accommodated to others’ necessities. Suppose the pastor’s attentive listening, however, picks up underneath this extraordinary accommodation a tone of grief over some unspecified loss. Such a parishioner needs to face that grief. In time, and precisely through a conversational process, says Gregory, such an individual may come to hear through scripture the Spirit’s address that love is not only patient but, as Paul immediately adds, also kind (1 Cor. 13). The superpatient individual may become inwardly festered with an interior malice which Gregory can only call "the mother of vices," because it is so much the opposite of that agape which is the root of all behavioral excellences. This is why Paul pastorally instructed the Ephesians, not just toward patience as if that were the only virtue, but also to work and talk and pray in order to be able to put away bitterness, indignation, and malice (Eph. 4:12).

Gregory set forth a psychologically complex and subtle analysis of the way in which demonic temptation functions in the consciousness of the excessively patient person. The temptations of fallen freedom are working simultaneously on two different fronts: first, to inflame insult and, second, to repay insult with insult.¹⁴ The inordinately patient person has already conquered the first enemy, having borne with limitation. Yet temptation is not yet over, for it continues to work within the consciousness of the patient person by harassment, by secret suggestion, by laying hidden snares, by constantly reminding one of one’s loss and of the insults one has suffered. These in time may tend to become grossly exaggerated so that they come to symbolize the way in which all of life has become insufferably insulting. In this way the mind of the overly patient person becomes vexed and disturbed.

Here Gregory develops two ironic analogies. The superpatient person is like one who has a very serious illness, who has come through the most dangerous phase of the illness yet later unexpectedly dies from a sudden relapse of fever; the fever was finally the cause of death.¹⁵ Again, the superpatient person is like a soldier who has had a great victory in the field — the main battle is over; going into the city thinking the victory already secured, the negligent soldier is stupidly captured by a small, insignificant force within the gates.

The winner of patience has in a sense won the greater external victory and yet lost the struggle with quietly festering resentment. The spiritual gifts received through patience can be spoiled by malice. This inward battle of the patient individual is "visible under the divine scrutiny, and will become the worse, in proportion as they claim a show of virtue in the sight of men."¹⁶

FIGHTERS AND LOVERS

It is instructive to see how deeply Gregory intuited much of the interpersonal analysis that was later to be developed in the modern behaviorist tradition of vector analysis by G. Homans, R. Carson, T. Leary, J. Thibaut, and H. Kelley.¹⁷ According to this modern behaviorist analysis, human interaction patterns can be graphed on the vectors of two poles: a horizontal emotive axis that registers resistance versus affection, and a vertical pole that registers superordination and subordination, or relative power or influence in relationships. In every interaction two parties relate to each other in terms of some positive or negative affect and some perceived upper and lower status, or relative power or acquiescence. Thus the two basic axes of interaction analysis are the resistance/warmth pole and the power/acquiescence pole.¹⁸ Gregory had an uncanny intuitive sense of how interactions work along these two axes, even though the empirical research on them came fourteen centuries later.

Gregory recognized the need for different types of pastoral counsel for persons who come from opposite quarters of this spectrum of interpersonal preferences. Discordant and hostile persons are to be treated in a different way than pacific and intimacy-seeking persons. Those who are prone always to give aggressive resistance come from a different interaction posture than those who are prone to friendly ploys and encounters. In Gregory’s terms the quarrelsome and the sowers of discord must be pastorally counseled in a different way than the affectionate and peaceful.¹⁹

What sort of pastoral care is indicated for the quarrelsome? They need above all to be addressed inwardly by the word of scripture that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and peace (Gal. 5:22). This can be spoken credibly only by one who does indeed keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3). It is hoped that the perpetually discordant parishioner could be moved by gentle pastoral interaction to better grasp the disastrous social consequences of contentiousness. The reason unconstrained aggression is so potentially destructive to human relationships is that often it does not permit those subsequent goods to emerge which otherwise could have taken root if they had not been withered by the heat of aggression. Excessive discord breaks off relationships so that other interpersonal values cannot even be attempted. This is why Jesus insisted that if you come to the altar and remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift on the altar and first be reconciled to your brother. Seriousness about interpersonal reconciliation is a precondition of seriousness about reconciliation with God.²⁰

One may have acquired many other excellent interpersonal habits, yet lose their good effect because of this one disastrous tendency toward vituperative anger. You may have admirable courage, fidelity, discipline, and hope, but if you are prone to vindictive quarrelsomeness, the potential goods of those hard-won virtues may tend to become lost because of the antagonisms that have been unnecessarily elicited. The person of high intelligence is not thereby exempt from this temptation. Those who acquire power in the form of knowledge may find that it "separates them from the society of others, and the greater the knowledge, the less wise they are in the virtue of concord."²¹

Some are not just occasionally quarrelsome, but seem constantly, almost compulsively, to be looking for fights. Either deliberately or unawarely they create discord. The pastoral task is to help them grasp how potentially demonic and dysfunctional this habit formation may become. Gregory was convinced that "the enemy," a transpersonal demonic influence, was involved in this syndrome. Prov. 6:12 describes the behavior pattern of one who sows discord, who devised evil, who has a perverse mouth. Its spiritual root is an alienated will that has not learned how properly to order human loves. In this way charity, the mother of virtues, is extinguished. "Since nothing is more esteemed by God than the virtue of charity, nothing is more desired by the Devil than its extinction."²² Pastoral counsel must then become a deliberate training ground in the possibility and value of sustained covenant relationships.

On the other hand, the pastor is destined to deal often with persons who are inordinately drawn to excessively quiescent, pacified, nonconflictive relations. Such persons will be prone always to sympathize with others, so as not to recognize the need for corrective candor or critical feedback. They are compulsively tempted toward tranquility. They are inordinately prone to flee to temporary peacefulness while failing to love well enough the peace of God which can challenge and disturb human tranquilities. The eternal shalom of God may interrupt and upset our outward forms of peace.²³

This is why peace must be both loved and condemned. It is to be condemned insofar as worldly stability is immoderately loved. The parishioner who inordinately loves peace needs a pastor who will show a better way to meet conflict. The capacity for candor, confrontation, and encounter may be grossly truncated in one who has an inordinate fear and avoidance of human conflicts.²⁴ It is fitting to learn to provide resistance and critical negation to that which stands in enmity to the peace of God (Ps. 138:21). This is the ironic sense in which Jesus "did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34). There is in Jesus’ message a healthy capacity for conflict and resistance. It is not simply naive love or costless reconciliation. The person who inordinately loves love, who in an excessive way desires to live in absolute peace, will need a mode of pastoral care that will foster growth in critical judgment.

The proper balance is again struck by Paul, who wrote: "So far as it is within your power, live peaceably with everyone" (Rom. 12:18, NIV). But this is a guarded statement with a qualifying clause: "so far as it is possible." This balance is what the counseling pastor must learn to grasp situationally, so as to recognize the difference between the need of the parishioner who is overly aggressive and the need of the parishioner who is trapped in a compulsive search for tranquility.²⁵

The Powerful and the Acquiescent

In every interaction with another person there is some dimension of power, status, superordination or subordination, influence or acquiescence that enters into the relationship (unless the relation can somehow be maintained in a continuing equilibrium as precisely equal). In any given social organization there are differences of function in which some persons ordinarily exercise greater power and influence than others, while others are relatively more recipients of influence. The pastor deals with both the persons of power and the persons without power, persons with influence and persons without influence. Gregory argued that the pastor must learn how to deal resourcefully with both types without being either intimidated or insensitive.²⁶

Persons who are relatively powerful, who are in charge of processes, organizations, or structures of influence may need pastoral counsel that will guide them away from the egocentric abuse of power and toward a more morally accountable use of power. Those who are relatively powerless or less influential may need to be counseled in a different way, so as not to allow themselves to be run over or demoralized. They need to learn the art of possibility, discovering what is possible precisely within the constraints of their time and place, and to do whatever can be done creatively within an intractably limited context.²⁷

Gregory focuses on the relationship of parents to children. This is the arena in which scripture deals most prototypically with the right relation of power and powerlessness. The key New Testament injunction has two interrelated parts: Children are called to obey parents; parents are called not to "exasperate your children" (Col. 3:20-21). The relation of parents and children stands as a broad paradigm of the possibilities and temptations accompanying all relationships of relative power and relative dependency. Scripture calls children to submit to legitimate guidance, but it is hoped that the guidance will be so wisely conceived as not to provoke children to anger.²⁸

By analogy, if a parishioner is given power, or charged with leading an organization, or stands in a position of relative in fluence, then the greater is the weight and dimension of moral accountability. The employer for example, who fails even to try to correct manifest abuses eventually "comes to that state which his negligence deserves,²⁹ eventually becoming unable even to recognize the foibles and misjudgments of business associates. If you fail to give corrective admonition motivated by love, then not only will those in your charge remain uncorrected — you will therefore have failed in your duty to them — but things may drift into a worse state and you will fail even to grasp what has gone awry. When a leader disavows leadership, the whole body politic suffers.

Those with less influence need to be counseled in a different way. Precisely because they are in a privileged position of being less responsible for others, they are called to be more responsible for themselves!

What if power is abused? Gregory relates an amusing biblical story that illustrates a better way to challenge the abuses of power. Saul, who had unjustly treated David and was now pursuing him in the wilderness of En-gedi, had gone into a cave for the purpose of relieving himself. Hidden in this cave were David and his soldiers. The soldiers thought that David should attack Saul in his moment of inconvenience. David answered that one ought not to lay hands on the Lord’s anointed, the legitimate ruler to whom obedience is due, the one who is called to preserve order. So while Saul was relieving himself David silently, stealthily crept up and symbolically cut off a noticeable piece out of the king’s cloak (1 Sam. 24:4ff.). Far from being an act of rebellion or an open attempt outwardly to overthrow abused power, it was a quiet, constrained, symbolic act that ironically caught the person of highest power in the midst of a most ordinary human activity. All this occurred harmlessly and unobserved, without Saul even knowing it. Saul’s power was not overtly challenged in violent ambush, but its moral credibility was pointedly challenged and revealed as limited and vulnerable. For Saul later realized that David could have killed him then and there in the cave. David’s restraint of power was grounded in his awareness of God’s incomparable power. David and his soldiers could easily have seized power, but he chose a better way.

Gregory thought that this was an exemplary statement of the way to protest the abuse of coercive authority — not by overt, destructive, risk-laden rebellion, but by a symbolic demonstrative act revealing the vulnerable moral credibility of abused power. Yet even in this case, Gregory noted that shortly thereafter David was himself struck with grief merely because he had cut the hem of the king’s robe. Even that, thought Gregory, was exemplary because it showed the sensitivity of David — the low influence partner — to the importance of maintaining order in society, that very order which had been abused but nonetheless remained necessary and tolerable even in its abuse.³⁰ The parishioner who has relatively less influence may need similar counsel: Do not prematurely seek to grab more influence, as if that were the only solution. Rather, acquiesce to legitimate authority. Exercise patience and tolerance. Continue to pray with serenity, even in the midst of the abuse of power. God is the Lord of both — those who have relatively more power and those who have relatively less (Eph. 6:9).

The Rich and the Poor

The pastor deals with all kinds of people, some of whom have relatively more economic power and prestige of ownership, some relatively less. Some people have extraordinarily great resources, while others are destitute of resources and even of the capacity to earn them. Pastoral responses to these varied cases cannot be the same. Those who have greater resources are to be counseled against pride and arrogance, while those with limited resources may pastorally need more the "solace of encouragement against tribulation".³¹

Gregory’s ministry showed great concern not only for the practical, temporal, bodily care of the poor, as we have previously indicated, but also for the moral development of the poor. His central point: the poor deserve to hear the word of scripture, and the pastor has a duty to deliver that word to them. It is first of all a word of consolation. The poor are not to fear: "Fear not, you shall not be put to shame" (Isa. 54:4). But this counsel is linked with an eschatological promise that their descendants shall "people the desolate cities."³² Out of a well-conceived pastoral theodicy, the pastor will help the oppressed to understand that their affliction may be a meaningful test of faith: "See how I tested you, not as silver is tested, but in the furnace of affliction; there I purified you" (Isa. 48:10).

On the other hand, the letter to Timothy suggested a different pattern of pastoral care of the rich:

Instruct those who are rich in this world’s goods not to be proud, and not to fix their hopes on so uncertain a thing as money, but upon God, who endows us richly with all things to enjoy. Tell them to do good and to grow rich in noble actions, to be ready to give away and to share, and so acquire treasure which will form a good foundation for the future. Thus they will grasp the life which is life indeed (I Tim. 6:17-19).

The text does not say that we are to beg the rich, but rather that we are to instruct and charge them on apostolic authority that they not be "puffed up." They need this pastoral admonition if they are to understand that they cannot retain their wealth forever, and that they did not create the conditions for wealth. Otherwise the words of Jesus apply: "Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation (Luke 6:24, RSV). The rich have completely missed the consolation of God if they simply consider this world their final consolation.³³

Gregory’s approach to pastoral care of the rich has exceptional subtlety, hinging importantly upon the biblical paradigms of Nathan before David and of David’s care for Saul.³⁴ When pastors come before the wealthy as spiritual guides, they do well to remember what Nathan did in the case of the poor man whom the rich man had abused. The poor man had nothing of his own except one little ewe lamb that he had reared himself. It had eaten from his dish and drunk from his cup; it had nestled in his arms and was like a daughter to him. When a traveler came by and a local rich man wanted to display his conspicuous consumption but was too stingy to take something from his own store, he seized the ewe from the poor man and offered it to the traveler. That was the case study that Nathan presented to David, asking David what should be done. David answered angrily that the rich man deserved to die, and the poor man should be paid four times over for the stolen lamb. Nathan then said, "You are the man." Only then was Nathan in a sound position to confront David with his own sin in the case of his adultery with Bathsheba and the death of Uriah (2 Sam. 12: 1-14).

Gregory found in Nathan’s example a powerful model of how to proceed in a teaching ministry of pastoral care to the rich, who may be blind to their own pride and power and unaware of their own collusion with economic misery. The pastor proceeds by analogy so that the person being challenged will come up with a self-judgment based on the person’s own conscience. The next crucial step is to help the person see clearly that judgment of conscience. Enabling one’s conscience to become transparent to oneself constitutes a more significant pastoral service than harangue or castigation.

Gregory’s corollary biblical paradigm comes from the complex relation between Saul and David. It is said that at times the only thing that would console Saul’s depression was young David playing his harp. Whenever a "frenzied spirit" seized Saul, "David would take his harp and play on it, so that Saul found relief; he recovered and the evil spirit left him alone" (1 Sam. 16:23). Saul therefore made David his armor-bearer, and kept David with him constantly. From this interpersonal example, Gregory draws a broad analogy to illuminate the paradoxical relation of poverty and riches. There is a greater spiritual hazard in being wealthy and powerful than in being poor and powerless. The caretaker owes a duty to the rich to challenge them to use their resources responsibly, so as not to trust in the uncertainty of riches. Yet this may need to be done in the form of a harp, to soothe the madness of unchecked power gently by sweet tones. For riches intensify pride. Wealth gets itself locked into illusions that tend to block any form of corrective reproof. Therefore the harp must be used tenderly to stroke away the madness. But that is done only in order to come later to the point of a clearer pastoral attempt to nurture attitudes of mercy and justice as opposed to pride and inordinate trust in riches.³⁵

The Intimidated and the Arrogant

Those who think of assertiveness training as an incomparably modern and recent innovation do well to examine some of Gregory’s admonitions to the excessively humble. Some persons become so addicted to low status positions that they drift into winless dependency relationships. Others become oppositely addicted to excessive independence and haughtiness. These two polar types require different sorts of pastoral response.³⁶

The easily intimidated are counseled "not to be more submissive than is becoming."³⁷ Gregory is aware of the proneness to self-deception amid seeming humility. The care of their souls requires helping them to see how they may be unnecessarily living out "a faulty timidity under the guise of humility."³⁸

On the other hand, Gregory viewed persistent arrogance as having a primordially mysterious and transhistorical root in the demonic rebellion of the devil and his angels against the goodness of God because of their wish to be superior to God. This pattern was the mirror opposite of the redeemer who became as nothing in order to minister to humanity. "What, then, is baser than haughtiness, which, by overreaching itself, removes itself from the stature of true eminence? And what is more sublime than humility, which, in debasing itself to the lowest, joins itself to its Maker who remains above the highest?"³⁹

The dynamics of arrogance have as much potential self-deception in them as do the dynamics of humility. Arrogance may firmly believe itself to be just while remaining quite ignorant of its own ploys. What is required pastorally in such a case? Gregory applies this analogy: The arrogant person is something like an unbroken horse, a wild, unruly animal that first must be stroked gently and only later controlled with aversive reinforcement. Pastoral care in this case is something like the treatment of a physician who provides a potent but distasteful drug to a highly resistant patient by mixing it with a generous amount of sweet honey. This is required for pastoral care of the arrogant, who otherwise would never take the medicine.⁴⁰

Imagine an intensely egocentric individual who remains stubbornly resistant to all reasonable counsel. Ironically, such a person is more likely to change some behavior patterns if the amendment that is requested seems more a favor to someone else than a matter of self-profit. For self-centered persons judge everything in relation to its profit to themselves. If the pastor can initially convince the egocentric that the needed change is not for self-benefit but for the convenience of someone else, that is more likely to have greater appeal. The egocentric will quickly grasp that self-interest can then parade as altruism.

Gregory dutifully illustrates this with a Biblical type: When Hobab wanted to abandon the tribe of Israel and return to his home country, Moses had the practical problem of persuading him to continue in the covenant community; otherwise there would be no possibility of redemption. Moses, who already knew the way ahead, deliberately feigned an appeal to Hobab not to leave, citing as grounds the fact that Hobab knew the territory of the wilderness and could serve as the people’s guide (Num. 10:29-3 1). The interaction is filled with irony: The self-centered man is being counseled by the wiser soul guide who already knows the way but who asks him anyway to be the leader, not because his leadership was necessary but in order that Hobab might be more profoundly led.⁴¹

The Fickle and the Obstinate

Some parishioners are prone to what Gregory calls "lightheadedness." They are too easily influenced and therefore always changing their direction. Paul had recognized such persons in his congregations..people who were "whirled about by every fresh gust of teaching" (Eph. 4:14). Like Kierkegaard’s aesthete, whose life is tyrannized by irresolution, such persons are always looking outside themselves to find a cure for their despair.

Their deeper dilemma, in Gregory’s view, is that they tend to "undervalue and disregard themselves too much, and so are turned aside from their own judgment in successive moments of time."⁴² When a whirlwind of opinion flies about them, they lose their identity because they refuse to choose, having never learned effectively to bind time with choice.

How is such a person to be dealt with pastorally? Gregory recognized that this individual is having difficulty in developing what we today would call increased ego strength and personal identity. Gregory’s way of putting it carried the same meaning: It is as if one’s soul or personal center is a leaf being blown around, so light that it does not have any substance. What one needs is, metaphorically speaking, an increased self-weight or heaviness, in the sense of a palpably defined selfhood as opposed to an identity lightness. When Gregory speaks here of "levity," he does not mean humor or wit, but technically a lack of substance to one’s choosing and being, and therefore a lack of self-definition, self-understanding, and self-identity. So this person needs to be pastorally shepherded toward greater capacity for cutting through either/or decisions. If the central problem is irresolution which forever looks for someone else to give one direction, then the remedy is to grow in the capacity for decisive resolution. Gregory anticipates Kierkegaard’s description of certain types of aesthetic nonchoosers who are habitually resistant to deciding anything.⁴³

This pattern can be better grasped by comparison with its opposite, the assertive individualist, or as Gregory says, "The obstinate individual." There are people who overestimate their own capacity to make hard choices and who discount everybody else’s judgment. Paul firmly counseled such characters to "be not wise in your own conceits" (Rom. 12:16, KJV). The conceit hinges on the fact that one cannot listen clearly to anyone else’s view. One obstinately thinks that one’s own opinion is weightier than anybody or everybody else’s.

In this dipolar case study, Gregory enunciated a pivotal maxim that may be taken to be a major principle of his pastoral care: "certain faults beget others."⁴⁴ If you already have the fault of indecisiveness, you are therefore prone to becoming fickle. One fault begets another. If, on the other hand, you are already trapped in egocentric self-assertiveness, that is prone to beget obstinacy. Pastoral wisdom must grasp the difference between these two polarities, and wisely treat them in different ways. You do not want to cause the indecisive person to become even more weightless and pliable. You do not want to elicit in the assertive person greater obstinacy. What is needed is a finely tuned balance. Gregory sought to bring these virtues into an equilibrium so that neither exists in deficit or in excess.⁴⁵

The Habitually Angry and the Meek

Returning to the emotive axis of interpersonal analysis, Gregory deals with two opposite types of pastoral challenges: the perennially outraged person and the excessively meek person.⁴⁶ How does the pastor wisely deal with the one who is always feeling offended, forever hankering for a fight? This is an interpersonal posture that the classical tradition has termed "choleric" — passionately angry, easily set off in confrontations, always ready to be provoked and to provoke others, irascible, tending toward malice and at times violence. All of these aggressive behaviors, as we might guess, eagerly seek to parade outwardly as the laudable virtues of justice, candor, and righteousness.⁴⁷

Gregory was keenly aware of the complex psychological dynamics of anger. One who perennially wants to fight may unawarely be looking for someone to fight with. Thus there is a tendency to provoke responses of anger and thereby to "succeed" in eliciting aggression. Most persons would prefer not to have to deal with the hazards of anger, but those of choleric temperament may feel better when they are "hooking" or eliciting anger from others, as it were, to test out their own strength. "The choleric pursue even those who shun them, stirring up occasions of strife, rejoicing in the trouble caused by contention."⁴⁸

Gregory then takes the opposite case of the overly friendly individual who does not have a developed capacity to confront others. Such a person is intimidated by the slightest show of hostility. Softened by the lack of ego-strength and critical capacity, this person is quickly immobilized by aggressive ploys, needing to learn to express resistance more actively and assertively.

The wise counselor will search for a balanced equilibrium between conflict capability and the capacity for intimacy. Gregory’s unique way of pointing to this balance comes in his discussion of the Holy Spirit, who combines these qualities in exemplary proportion. For the Holy Spirit is paradoxically symbolized by two seemingly contrary symbols — dove and fire. Pastoral counsel needs both. The wise counselor learns through dialogical experience to add to meekness zeal and to temper zeal with compassion.

Paul is Gregory’s primary model of this equilibrium, especially in Paul’s exceptionally different vocational counsels to Timothy and Titus.⁴⁹ To Timothy he said: Admonish others in all patience (2 Tim. 4:2). To Titus he said: Admonish others with all authority (Titus 2:15). Gregory thought that the difference of emphasis was not accidental, but responsive to the varied predispositions of the two young men. His interpretation brings to a fitting conclusion this chapter on contextual pastoral counsel:

Is it not that he sees Titus endowed with too meek a spirit, and Timothy with a little too zealous one? He enflames the one with zeal, and the other he restrains with a gentleness of patience. He gives to one what is lacking, he takes away from the other what is excessive. He aims at urging on the one with a spear; he checks the other with a bridle. Being the great husbandman that he is, having taken the church under his care, he waters some shoots that they may grow, but prunes others when he perceives their excessive growth.⁵⁰

NOTES:

1. PC 3, Prologue.

2. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations and Letters, NPNF, 2d series, vol. 7 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976) "Second Oration," 210ff.

3. PC 3, Prologue.

4. Ibid., 3.1.

5. Cf. Oden, TAG, 3-26.

6. PC 3.7.

7. Ibid.

8. PC 3.8.

9. BPR 2.8.

10. PC 3.9.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. BPR 3.9.

14. PC 3.9.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. For a fuller bibliography of this literature, see my TAG, 116ff.

18. Oden, TAG, 1-17.

19. PC 3.22.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. PC 3.23.

23. BPR 3.22.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Oden, TAG, 3-10.

27. PC 3.4.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. PC 3.5.

31. PC 3.2.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. BPR 3.2.

35. PC 3.2.

36. PC 3.17.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. PC 3.18.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.; cf. 2.2ff.

46. PC 3.16; cf. Oden, TAG, 3ff.

47. PC 3.16; cf. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1959).

48. PC 3.16.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.