Existential-humanistic psychology

Abstract

Existential-humanistic psychology recovers neglected philosophical and spiritual categories regarded as proper to human being, in contrast with animal life or inanimate systems. Existential-humanistic proto-discourses are important to Vincent McHugh’s I Am Thinking of My Darling (1943), in which an emerging ideal of personal authenticity queries the American Dream in 1940s’ New York. McHugh’s critical utopia contrasts with the ponderous extrapolations of Colin Wilson in The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Space Vampires (1976), and Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City (1969). Both these authors – despite their widely differing positions in the literary canon – use science fiction as a didactic and futurological (even prophetic) medium in which existential psychology serves as the supposed rationale for spiritual apotheosis (including the cultivation of psi powers). A more fruitful post-war deployment of existential-humanistic psychology can be found in texts such as Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘And Now the News …’ (1956), Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which critique the instrumental tendencies of mainstream psychology.