Paul Vitz: Psychological Mythbuster

By Wanda Skowronska

American psychologist, Paul Vitz, was a pioneer critic of the ‘me, me, me’ generation and humanistic psychology which flourished alongside it. He stands out because of the cultural, psychological and spiritual depth of his critique. Mythbusters are rare and Vitz is a mythbuster par excellence, tearing apart several generations of selfism with insight, wisdom and wit. Other critiques came much later. He saw it all at the time.

This book takes the reader on a journey into the life and thought of a rare thinker, a questioner of ideological sacred cows, and one of the most original and gifted psychologists of the past century.

PAUL VITZ WAS A VISIONARY FOR HIS TIME IN CONFRONTING AND MYTHBUSTING HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AMIDST ‘A TSUNAMI OF HUMANISTIC ADULATION.’ THIS BOOK GIVES PERCEPTIVE INSIGHTS INTO VITZ'S THOUGHT AND TIMES. WELL WORTH READING!

– Catherine MacLaurin, Psychologist, Senior Wellbeing Advisor (SWA), Health and Safety Directorate, NSW Department of Education and Training, Australia

THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, PAUL VITZ, HAS BEEN A REMARKABLY PRESCIENT AND COURAGEOUS CRITIC OF THE HUMANIST PSYCHOLOGY MOVEMENT, HEADLINED BY CARL ROGERS. IN THIS BOOK, WANDA SKOWRONSKA HAS PROVIDED A THOROUGH AND CONVINCING ACCOUNT OF VITZ’S WORK. HER BOOK DESERVES A WIDE READERSHIP.

– Colin Patterson STD, Dean and Permanent Fellow of the former John Paul II Institute, Melbourne, Australia.

IN HER BOOK, WANDA SKOWRONSKA MASTERFULLY NARRATES THE PHILOSOPHICAL, THEOLOGICAL, AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY, ESPECIALLY THAT OF CARL ROGERS, THROUGH THE LENS OF PAUL C. VITZ’S LIFE AND PUBLICATIONS. THIS WORK CRITIQUES THE INFLUENCES OF CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY’S HUMANISTIC ORIGINS OF SELF-FULFILMENT THEORIES AND CULTURAL MARXISM AND HONOURS THE LIFELONG WORK OF PAUL VITZ, WHO IS UNDOUBTEDLY ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT CATHOLIC PSYCHOLOGISTS OF OUR TIMES.

– Professor Craig Steven Titus, S.Th [http://s.th/].D./Ph.D. Divine Word University, USA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398408869

Wanda Skowronska

Wanda Skowronska is a Catholic psychologist and author, living and working in Sydney, Australia. She completed a PhD. at the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne, in 2011, where she did sessional lecturing. She is author of several books including To Bonegilla from Somewhere (2012) Angels Incense and Revolution: Catholic Schooldays of the 1960s (2019) and Paul Stenhouse: a Life of Rare Wisdom, Compassion and Inspiration (2021). She has written for several periodicals, including Annals Australasia, Quadrant, Homiletic and Pastoral Review and The Catholic Weekly.

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Foreword

One of my strongest memories of religious education in the 1970s is of sitting in class in a convent school filling out a list of quite invasive personal questions about my moral attitudes and practices. I can remember finding the questions offensive.

For example, did I take drugs, and if so, how often. Was I sexually active, and if so, did I feel any guilt about this? I also remember that the girls in the class who came from the strongest Catholic families were those who were graded lowest on this ‘exam’.

Although I was not in the camp of those from a strong Catholic family, I too found myself being classified as operating on the very lowest level of moral development along with one of my best friends who was the eldest of six children from a devoutly Catholic family and the dux of our class.

We completely bombed out because our moral code was linked to a belief in God. It was only years later when I was at university that I came to understand that we were guinea-pigs in the Kohlberg experiment.

Kohlberg’s theories have now been subjected to strong criticism from within the secular psychology academies but his ideas can still be found floating around Catholic educational circles.

Another standout memory of my youth was attending a lecture by Fr Mitch Pacwa in New Farm, Brisbane, where he deconstructed the enneagram as a cart-load of mumbo-jumbo. At this event an aged nun shouted in a shrill voice, ‘You’re destroying my ministry!’

I was also once given a fluffy toy rabbit by a friend who had been on an enneagram retreat weekend. As each participant in the retreat left to go home they were presented with a toy animal associated with their personality type. My friend was given a rabbit. She was a scholar in the field of Carmelite spirituality. She had read St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Edith Stein, among others.

She was somewhat bemused by the whole experience and passed the rabbit onto me since I am known to like cute furry animals – a character trait I regard as being of no theological significance. I simply have happy childhood memories of my grandmother reading me stories from English magazines about anthropomorphic British woodland creatures. Rabbits, badgers, foxes and otters appeared in most of her stories.

For anyone who went through Catholic schools or seminaries in the late 1960s and 1970s there will be many pages of this work that will recall to mind the pastoral experiments and other useless nonsense that passed for spiritual direction in that era. Genuinely, great Catholic psychologists and spiritual directors like Fr Benedict Groeschel were yet to arrive on the international scene.

Wanda Skowronska has written an intellectual and social history of those times, mapping the origins of so-called Humanistic Psychology and its perfect storm convergence with Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and the effects of these twin forces on the history of western culture, especially religious institutions within western culture, in the last half century. She systematically untangles the web of forces that fostered the cult of self-worship and its narcissistic culture.

Of special historical interest is the fact that the first Catholic institution to fall victim to the influence of Humanistic Psychology was the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an Order of religious women who ran a number of schools for Catholic girls in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, including the Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood.

It has been argued by other authors that elements of the Californian hippie happenings of the late 1960s had already been anticipated in the drama classes at the Immaculate Heart schools. (See, for example, chapter 8 of Mark S Massa Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day and the Notre Dame Football Team).

Today this school is famous for the number of people it has produced who are promoters of gender fluidity and other fashionable tropes of cultural Marxism.

This work is not, however, limited to an examination of the philosophical and theological presuppositions of Humanistic Psychology and its operation as a solvent for a culture based on belief in the Incarnation.

Positively, the author also showcases the works of the Catholic psychologist Paul Vitz and the convergence of his studies with the theological anthropology of St. John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

In a work written in the late 1960s on the understanding of the dignity of the human person in the Conciliar document Gaudium et spes, Joseph Ratzinger suggested that the Christocentric paragraphs within that document provide the foundation for what he called a daring new theological anthropology.

This anthropology was further developed by St John Paul II in his suite of Trinitarian encyclicals – Redemptor Hominis, Dives in Misericordia and Dominum et Vivificantem – as well as in his Catechesis on Human Love. In particular, the Catechesis on Human Love addresses issues in human sexuality which offer an alternative way of understanding this dimension of human life to that on offer by both Freudian and Humanistic Psychology.

Wanda Skowronska’s family lived through the Warsaw Uprising and her family came to Australia as refugees after the Second World War ended. I sometimes think that Polish people have a special charism for seeing through ideological nonsense.

The fact that their country was attacked by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia seems to have given them an unsurpassed ability to distinguish truth from propaganda. In Skowronska’s analysis unfolded in this work, both Humanistic Psychology and the Frankfurt School’s theories about the so-called authoritarian personality type, are mere propaganda.

In a nutshell, the choice is: Wojtyła and Vitz OR Rogers and Marcuse. These options represent radically different understandings of human psychology and human dignity and, of course, questions of soteriology.

Part of the epic tragedy of Catholicism in the past half century is that its schools, seminaries and religious orders became infested with pastoral programmes running along the tracks of Rogers and Marcuse with the concomitant jettisoning of some two millennia of spiritual wisdom and experience. Instead of the fruits of Eucharistic adoration people were handed fluffy rabbits, butcher’s paper, crayons and play-dough.

At the 2015 Synod on the Family, Dr Anca-Maria Cernea, the President of the Catholic Doctors Association of Bucharest, suggested that if Catholic leaders really wanted to understand the crisis in family life in Europe they should study the influence of Frankfurt School theories on Catholic theology in the 1960s and beyond.

A place where such a study could begin is the article ‘Theology and Praxis’ published in 1973 in the journal Cross Currents by Charles Davis (who had been a priest and professor of theology at Heythrop College in London before his laicisation in 1966). He described the attraction of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory to Belgian and Dutch theologians in the following terms:

Fundamental for them as a consequence of their acceptance of the Marxist unity of theory and praxis is a conviction that the permanent self-identity of the Christian faith cannot be presupposed…They reject a theoretical system of identity. There is no purely theoretical centre of reference, which can serve in an abstract, speculative way as a norm of identity. Truth does not yet exist; it cannot be reached by interpretation, but it has to be produced by change. For these theologians therefore, faith is in a strong sense mediated in history through praxis. Praxis is not the application of already known truth or the carrying out of a transhistorical ideal; it is that process in and through which one comes to know present reality and future possibilities. If faith is mediated in praxis, it must renounce an a priori claim to self-identity and universality.

However, if the mediation of faith through praxis is consistently accepted, that means the destruction of theology in the current sense of the articulation of the immanent self-understanding of faith. Theology loses its boundaries as an independent discipline, because the only appropriate context for the conscious articulation of praxis is a theory of the development of society in its total reality. Included within such a comprehensive theory would be a critique of theological consciousness, replacing theology as a separate science.

In the final paragraph of his article Davis points to the significance of this appropriation of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School for theology with the rhetorical question:

"Is theology, as Schillebeeckx says, the critical self-consciousness of Christian praxis, or is [Leszek] Kołakowski right when he says: ‘For theology begins with the belief that truth has already been given to us, and its intellectual effort consists not of attrition against reality but of assimilation of something which is ready in its entirety’".

Arguably, Davis clearly saw what was at stake in this choice between the positions of the Frankfurt-school-influenced Schillebeeckx and the lapsed Communist but open to theism Kołakowski. In fact, I know of no better exposition of the intellectual foundation of the divisions in late twentieth century Catholicism than this article by Davis.

The present work of Wanda Skowronska clearly falls on Kołakowski’s side of this question. However, instead of investigating the significance of the choice for elements of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory for fundamental theology, Skowronska has examined the significance of the choice for spiritual development.

If a future pontiff does decide to write an encyclical on the bogus pastoral experiments of our era and their contribution to the current crisis in faith and practice, this book will be a very helpful place to begin his study of the problem.

Professor Tracey Rowland

University of Notre Dame (Australia)

Introduction

Paul Vitz, American Catholic, psychologist, academic and author, is a rare thinker who saw through an era besotted by humanistic psychology. He also foresaw its aftermath of ‘selfie’ worship and ‘goddesses within’ – and that is no mean feat.

When humanistic psychology emerged during the middle part of the last century, it was greeted as a triumph of western thought about the human person, the mind, and the goals of life. It influenced several generations of psychologists. People were swept up in its euphoric ambience and to criticise it would have been unthinkable, tantamount to spitting on Elvis. You just do not do it.

Actually, Vitz did not spit on the psychological Elvis, that was not his style – he was rather the questioner, critic and sceptic of a generation, casting great doubts on its grand claims, particularly those made by Carl Rogers. He deconstructed the new ‘humanists’ who called themselves ‘Humanistic Psychologists’ and in that way, he challenged an era.

Very few people see through the particular era they are living through. You are probably influenced more deeply by the various hidden forces of our times than you realise. How many of us can accurately predict what will happen in fifty years? And who could have seen fifty years ago, what would transpire in western society as the century wore on?

For example, was the Cold War really what it seemed to be – Communist Eastern Europe confronting a free, Christian west? Or were latent forces transforming the west into a more godless, secular liberal, ‘cultural Marxist’ society? Was the west absorbing a more subtle totalitarianism of politically correct mindsets which it did not see at the time?

Of course, there are many complex threads in the story of this transformation of the west and Vitz shows how psychology constituted a major enabler of the change. Vitz’s critiques of psychology expose the hidden agendas of how humanistic psychology, helped propel western culture and society away from its understanding of the human person based on its Judeo-Christian moorings.

The thing is, he did not do it in hindsight – he did it while it was happening, putting his university position, life, reputation and income at risk. He confronted a tsunami of humanistic adulation which brooked no opposition.

He wrote critiques of humanistic (and Freudian) psychology, when students, many Christians among them, were crowding psychology lecture halls, talking of ‘self-fulfilment’ and ‘encounter groups’ as if they had found the fast track to paradise, imbibing very anti-Christian Kool-Aid along the way.

Rogers’ self-fulfilment theories merged easily with the revolutionary spirit arising from the 1960s and Vitz saw that humanistic religion’s ‘dogmas’ were a new species of faith. He personally told me he felt very alone at that time saying this. If you wanted to be more widely unknown and unpopular in the 1960s and 70s, even more so than spitting on Elvis, then critiquing humanistic psychology was the way to go.

Vitz, however, was and is a born sceptic and saw what was hidden between the lines, not as omission, but as seduction and coercion. He saw that Humanistic Psychology had myriad assumptions to ensnare the unwary and beguile them and this book will outline how he unearthed what was hidden in a very cunning way.

Strange, that while Karol Wojtyła was outlining his ideas on theological anthropology in Lublin in the 1960s and 70s, Paul Vitz was quietly moving towards similar understandings of the human person. A historical irony if ever there was one.

Vitz began to articulate his critiques in the 1970s and has continued to do so in a considerable output of books and articles spanning almost half a century, covering his years as Professor of Psychology at New York State University and more recently as Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Virginia (now Divine Mercy University) in the United States.

In analysing the confusing utopianism around him with a colder, critical (and often witty) eye, one could call Vitz a western psychological Solzhenitsyn. His critiques are not only interesting for what they say, but in how they reveal the cultural mythbuster.

The following pages pay tribute to Vitz’s cultural mythbusting of humanistic utopianism – on theological, philosophical and historical levels – and hopes to shed light on the nature of his acute perceptiveness, courage and a certain kind of greatness.

Wanda Skowronska

July 31, feast day of St Ignatius of Loyola, 2020.

Chapter 1

Vitz and the Ambience of

Humanistic Psychology

When Paul Vitz started to practice psychology in the early 1960s, it was humanistic psychology that reigned supreme in most psychology departments. Its focus on the self tied in well with the ‘me’ generation reaching its apotheosis in the selfie frenzy of the new millennium.¹

In his account of the 1960s, Roy José Decarvalho referred to the rise of humanistic psychology as ‘third force’ psychology in a scholarly way, saying it rejected both Freudianism and behaviourism, seeing the ‘rebellious’ rejection of behaviourism in the post-World War II era as ‘an outcry against the mechanical image of human nature and applied sterility of behaviourism’.² The rejection of the negativity of Freud was a reaction against ‘formalism, determinism, reductionism, dogma and medical of psychoanalysis’ and its ‘frequent attention to the dark side of human nature’.³

In contrast, humanistic psychology affirmed the endless capabilities of the human person in its theory and applied psychotherapy and hence was also commonly referred to as ‘human potential psychology’⁴. It burst on the scene as a triumph, and appealed to the burgeoning ‘me’ generation, wearing flowers in their hair, singing of peace, painting a world where anything could happen. It suited an era of unbridled hope in human progress.

Vitz, the future psychologist entered the secular humanist world unawares – as did many in his generation – but what is remarkable is he did not stay there. He was born in Toledo Ohio (in 1935) into a family which had many Protestant ministers in its history. His great-grandfather Peter Vitz, came to America from Germany in 1853, and became a minister in the Evangelical church and ‘was a kind of pioneer minister to the new German communities of the Mid-West (Ohio, Indiana and Minnesota)’.⁵ And of his nine children, the five boys became ministers and the four girls married ministers. By the time Paul Vitz was growing up several generations later, such fervour had lessened as his father had more or less rejected the faith of his childhood. Apart from saying grace, and occasional criticism of the Catholic church, there was not much transmission of any serious religious belief during his youth.

After Vitz graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1957 and with a PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 1962, he taught at Pomona College and did post-doctoral work at Stanford University. He recalls in his first book, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (1977), that in graduate school any mention of religion in psychology courses ‘was treated as a pathetic anachronism’ and ‘the common interpretation was that people holding traditional religious views were fascist-authoritarian types’.⁶ This view has persisted – I recall it too, in my psychological training. This was no doubt because of the long-lasting influence of The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodore Adorno, which seemed to identify not only clearly negative traits such as aggression and submission with ‘the authoritarian personality’ but also any kind of ‘conventionalism’ that is, anyone with conservative religious and political views. The message transmitted by Adorno was subtle and many were not aware of it as it happened, and as it still happens. It was certainly intended by the Frankfurt school thinkers who were attacking western society from within at that time. Being a member of the Frankfurt school, Adorno’s outline of the authoritarian personality was a critique of western society and the supposed types of ‘personalities’ it produced. Thus, religious belief, purportedly derived from authoritarian personalities, was incompatible with progress, academia and any intelligent psychological discourse. Some psychologists still studied the psychology of religions as ‘exotic belief systems’ in the manner William James had treated the subject. But a palpable anti-Christian animus was the order of the day in psychology departments beneath a surface bonhomie and ‘tolerance’. From his own recollection, it was this animus that Vitz and generations of psychology students encountered on entering university psychology departments.

Examining the phenomenon, Vitz states that by the 1960s and 70s, humanistic psychology had taken hold so deeply in western society that that few, including himself, could escape its hold.⁷ (Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, 1977, henceforth PAR). He provocatively describes it as a new faith and says that it even trounced Freud. Writing in 1977 and reflecting on his earlier training, Vitz remarked:

In fact, most psychologists practicing today have been strongly affected by humanistic self theories. Many American psychoanalysts have accepted so much of self-psychology that it is difficult to identify them as Freudian at all (PAR, 14).

A strange remark, given the widespread view that Freud seemed to reign supreme and represented psychology and the therapeutic society. The archetypical view of a psychiatrist was that of Freud sitting engrossed, listening to a worried person lying on a couch. But Vitz sees another event as of monumental influence at the time – the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 (which Carl Rogers, along with Abraham Maslow, eagerly signed). It was clear to Vitz that humanistic psychology had much in common with this manifesto in rejecting Judeo-Christian principles and stressing personal and social fulfilment in this life.⁸ So, symbiotically linked was Carl Rogers with this manifesto, it was natural for him to receive the highest accolade of the American Humanist Association in 1964, an anti-Christian organ which ironically counted many Christian ministers of religion among its members who drew many unsuspecting parishioners along with them.⁹

Thus, ‘Humanistic Psychology’ became synonymous with a type of humanism – and both terms, ‘humanistic’ and ‘humanist’, were often used interchangeably.

Things moved quickly with opening of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) which grew rapidly after it was established in 1963 and in 1971, an exclusive division (Division 32) was established within the parameters of the American Psychological Association. The first Masters program in Humanistic Psychology was soon established at Sonoma State College founded in 1960, with a special focus on humanistic and existential psychology and similar courses at other universities rapidly followed.

According to Vitz, not even psychologists who tended to behaviourism and to (the then modern) transpersonal (New Age) theories arising in the 1970s could escape the stranglehold of humanistic psychology (PAR, 14). American psychologist, Don Browning, reached a similar conclusion to Vitz, but a decade later, stating that the reach of humanistic psychology was to the entire American culture saying, ‘there is little doubt that humanistic psychologies are major forces in shaping contemporary culture especially in the United States’.¹⁰ Browning added his view, namely that the ‘widespread evidence that humanistic psychology has had even more cultural influence than psychoanalysis’.¹¹ This view goes against the conventional wisdom that psychoanalysis triumphed in America, as expounded by Rieff in The Triumph of The Therapeutic (1966) who, while using the term ‘therapeutic’ in a wider sense, constantly refers to Freudian notions to explain it.

Joyce Milton echoes the views Browning and Vitz’s view in her