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Preface

This book concentrates on science as a product of the human nature of the scientist, not only of the cautious, conventional scientist but also of the daring, breakthrough revolutionary. To some extent this overlaps with the kind of science generated by the psychologically healthy scientist. This essay may be considered to be a continuation of my Motivation and Personality and especially of the first three chapters in which the psychology of science and of the scientist are dealt with specifically.

One basic thesis which emerges from this approach is that the model of science in general, inherited from the impersonal sciences of things, objects, animals, and part-processes, is limited and inadequate when we attempt to know and to understand whole and individual persons and cultures. It was primarily the physicists and the astronomers who created the Weltanschauung and the subculture known as Science (including all its goals, methods, axiomatic values, concepts, languages, folkways, prejudices, selective blind nesses, hidden assumptions). This has been pointed out by so many as to amount to a truism by now. But only recently has it been demonstrated just how and where this impersonal model failed with the personal, the unique, the holistic. Nor has an alternative model yet been offered to deal validly with the fully human person.

This I attempt to do in this book. I hope to show that these limitations of classical science are not intrinsically necessary. In the broad sense, science can be defined as powerful and inclusive enough to reclaim many of the cognitive problems from which it has had to abdicate because of its hidden but fatal weakness - its inability to deal impersonally with the personal, with the problems of value, of individuality, of consciousness, of beauty, of transcendence, of ethics. In principle, at least, science should be capable of generating normative psychologies of psychotherapy, of personal development, of eupsychian or utopian social psychology, of religion, of work, play, and leisure, of esthetics, of economics, and politics, and who knows what else?

I conceive such a change in the nature of science to be one delayed fulfillment of the revolutionary potential of the psychoanalytic movement. This fulfillment was delayed ironically by the fact that Freud was raised in the nineteenth-century version of science along with its determinism, causality, atomism, and reductiveness. Even though he spent his whole life unwittingly cutting the ground out from under this version of science and, in fact, destroying it, along with all pure rationalisms, Freud remained loyal to its Weltanschauung so far as I can tell. Unfortunately, none of the other great contributors to the development of modern psychodynamics - Adler, Jung, Reich, Rank, Horney, Fromm - were scientists and so did not address themselves directly to this problem. The only psychoanalyst I can think of now who has taken this job seriously is Lawrence Kubie. I hope very much that other psychoanalysts and psychodynamicists will continue to criticize science from the point of view of their data. I remember bursting out in irritation at one meeting. "Why do you keep asking if psychoanalysis is scientific enough? Why don't you ask if science is psychodynamic enough?" I ask the same question here.

This process of rehumanizing (and trans-humanizing) science can help to strengthen the nonpersonal sciences as well. Something like this is happening in various fields of biology, especially in experimental embryology. Out of the intrinsic dynamics of the facts themselves, this discipline has had to become holistic. See for instance the powerful writings of Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The hybrid "field" of psychosomatic medicine is also generating a profound critique of traditional science. So is endocrinology. Ultimately, I believe, all of biology will have to shake itself loose from a pure physical-chemical reductiveness, or at least it will have to transcend it in an inclusive way, that is, in a hierarchical integration.

My restlessness with classical science became serious only when I started asking new questions about the higher reaches of human nature. Only then did the classical scientific model in which I had been trained fail me. It was then that I had to invent, ad hoc, new methods, new concepts, and new words in order to handle my data well. Before this, for me, Science had been One, and there was but One Science. But now it looked as if there were two Sciences for me, one for my new problems, and one for everything else. But more recently, perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, it began to appear that these two Sciences could be generalized into One Science again. This new Science looks different however; it promises to be more inclusive and more powerful than the old One Science.

I have been disturbed not only by the more "anal" scientists and the dangers of their denial of human values in science, along with the consequent amoral technologizing of all science. Just as dangerous are some of the critics of orthodox science who find it too skeptical, too cool and nonhuman, and then reject it altogether as a danger to human values. They become "antiscientific" and even anti-intellectual. This is a real danger among some psychotherapists and clinical psychologists, among artists, among some seriously religious people, among some of the people who are interested in Zen, in Taoism, in existentialism, "experientialism", and the like. Their alternative to science is often sheer freakishness and cultishness, uncritical and selfish exaltation of mere personal experiencing, over-reliance on impulsivity (which they confuse with spontaneity), arbitrary whimsicality and emotionality, unskeptical enthusiasm, and finally navel-watching and solipsism. This is a real danger. In the political realm, antiscience could wipe out mankind just as easily as could value-free, amoral, technologized science.

We should remember the Nazis and Fascists with their call to blood and to sheer instinct, and their hostility to freely-probing intellect and to cool rationality.

I certainly wish to be understood as trying to enlarge science, not destroy it. It is not necessary to choose between experiencing and abstracting. Our task is to integrate them. The discursive style used in this book follows the lecture form. Lecturing permits the speaker to be more personal, to use examples from his own experience, to express his own opinions, doubts, and conjectures. I have taken advantage of these possibilities. And for this same reason, I have not made any systematic effort to document my theses with detailed references to the scientific literature. Nor does this book attempt to "cover the subject", or to be scholarly in a comprehensive or systematic way.

This book is a condensation of the systematic and comprehensive volume that I had hoped to write but couldn't. Partly this was due to the limitation of space and the pressure of time imposed by the lecture format. But it was also due to discovering Michael Polanyi's great book, Personal Knowledge, just as I had worked up a systematic outline and started writing. This profound work, which is certainly required reading for our generation, does much of what I had planned to do, and solves many of the problems which had concerned me. I changed my plans to focus particularly on some of the explicitly psychological problems and omitted or treated only briefly several of the topics I had planned to cover.

Acknowledgments

I should like to refer the reader to the prefaces to my previous books in which I expressed many of my intellectual obligations. In addition to those acknowledgments, I should like to add the following.

I made a most unusual experiment with my good friend and collaborator, Dr. Harry Rand, a psychoanalyst. He and I had been discussing through the years the psychodynamics of the intellectual and scientific life, of learning and teaching, and of their pathology. At one time or another, we talked about many of the topics touched on in this book, and I must owe far more to these discussions than I could be aware of. But more specifically, about a year ago, while preparing this manuscript, I fell simultaneously into a long spell of insomnia and into a writing block, something I had never experienced before. Although friendship has long been considered a bar to psychoanalytic work, we decided to try it. I am glad to report a most successful outcome after about thirty hours or so of "intellectual psychoanalysis" or whatever it ought to be called. We recommend that others try this most interesting experiment so that experience may accumulate and perhaps lead one day to more "normal" and generalized research. For this help, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr. Rand.

Within the field of what I have called the psychology of science, overlapping often with the philosophy of science, I must refer to the bibliography of this book as a list of acknowledgments of intellectual indebtedness. Even this is far from complete. Within it, however, there are still more special obligations which I should like to acknowledge in addition to my very special one to Polanyi.

I stumbled across the writings of David Lindsay Watson by sheer accident years ago and was much influenced by his iconoclasm. Like many forerunners, he has not been sufficiently appreciated, honored, or even noticed. Anyone interested in my book will certainly be interested in Watson's. I strongly urge that his works be read.

I learned much from the pioneering researches of Anne Roe as well as from her most recent follow-ups. I regret that I was not able to include a chapter on her work and on later studies of this type.

The writings of Jacob Bronowski were especially formative and influential. Frank Manuel's studies of Isaac Newton and our discussions of them taught me a great deal. The impact of these discussions is most evident in some portions of my last chapter, especially the section on good-humored skepticism. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West was important in developing my thinking. So also was Kuhn's monograph The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I have profited much from discussions with Aldous Huxley as well as from his writings.

I had so many references to and so many quotations from Manas that I finally deleted them in favor of this blanket acknowledgment of my heavy indebtedness to this most distinguished of the humanistic journals.

Finally I wish to express my thanks to Mrs. Alice Duffy for her very professional job of typing and retyping this manuscript.

Abraham H. Maslow Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts February 1966



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