 | |
| Photo by Daniel Oines, Flickr creative commons |
'These psychologies give promise of developing into the life-philosophy, the religion-surrogate, the value-system, the life-program that these people have been missing. Without the transcendent and the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic. We need something "bigger than we are" to be awed by and to commit ourselves to in a new, naturalistic, empirical, non-churchly sense, perhaps as Thoreau and Whitman, William James and John Dewey did.
I believe that another task which needs doing before we can have a good world is the development of a humanistic and transpersonal psychology of evil, one written out of compassion and love for human nature rather than out of disgust for it or out of hopelessness.
There are certainly good and strong and successful men in the world ... But it also remains true that there are so few of them even though there could be many more, and that they are often treated badly by their fellows.
... this fear of human goodness and greatness, this lack of knowledge of how to be good and strong, this fear of maturity and the godlikeness that comes with maturity, this fear of feeling virtuous, self-loving, love worthy, respect worthy.
Preface, p. iv
Abraham H Maslow, 'Toward a Psychology of Being'
Van Nostrard Reinhold NY 1968
