Worth a read

[Guest guest]

Issues, Etc. Journal - November 1996 - Vol. 2 No. 1

 

Meet Dr. Bill Coulson

 

Thoughts from the man who, together with Carl Rogers, pioneered the practice

of "encounter groups."

 

 

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Biographical Sketch

 

Introduction by Don Matzat:

 

Dr. William Coulson was a disciple of the influential American psychologist

Carl Rogers and for many years a co-practitioner of Roger's humanistic

"non-directive" therapy. In 1964, Coulson was chief-of-staff at Rogers'

Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California.

 

One of the popular methods of psychotherapy in the 60's and 70's was the

"encounter group." The participants in such groups, under the direction of a

facilitator, were encouraged to unmask their real feelings as they

interacted with the other group participants. The practice has widely

entered the church in various forms.

 

As an initial experiment, Rogers and Coulson introduced the "encounter

group" dynamic into the Order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

in southern California. The results were devastating.

 

 

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NOTE:

 

The following thoughts from Dr. Coulson are excerpted from an article titled

"Repentant Psychologist: How I Wrecked the I. H. M.. Nuns" which appeared in

a 1994 special edition of The Latin Mass, Chronicle of Catholic Reform.

 

 

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Introducing Dr. William Coulson

 

edited by Don Matzat

 

Coulson describes what is meant by Humanistic Psychology:

 

"It is also called third-force psychology. Maslow referred to it as

Psychology Three. By that he meant to oppose it to Freud, which is

Psychology One, and Skinner and Watson, the behaviorists, which is

Psychology Two. We Catholics who got involved in it thought this third force

would take account of Catholic things. It would take account of the fact

that every person is precious, that we are not just corrupted as Freud would

have it, or a tabula rasa (clean slate), which is available to be

conditioned in whatever way the behaviorist chooses; but rather we have

human potential, and it's glorious because we are the children of a loving

Creator who has something marvelous in mind for every one of us."

 

What is the fatal flaw of Humanistic Psychology?

 

"But we didn't have a doctrine of evil. (Abraham) Maslow saw that we failed

to understand the reality of evil in the human life. When we implied to

people that they could trust their impulses, they also understood us to mean

that they could trust their evil impulses, that they weren't really evil.

But they were evil."

 

"Humanistic psychology, the kind that has virtually taken over the Church in

America, and dominates so many forms of aberrant education like sex

education, and drug education, holds that the most important source of

authority is within you, that you must listen to yourself."

 

"Maslow believed in evil, and we didn't. Maslow said there was danger in our

thinking and acting as if there were no paranoids or psychopaths or SOB's to

mess things up. We created a miniature utopian society, the encounter

group."

 

Coulson became a cohort of Carl Rogers at the University of Wisconsin and

later, with Rogers, moved to California to apply Rogers theories to

interested groups. He explains. . .

 

"Once I got to Wisconsin, I joined Rogers in his study of nondirective

psychotherapy with normal people. We had the idea that if it was good for

neurotics, it would be good for normals. Well, the normal people of

Wisconsin proved how normal they were by opting out as soon as they knew

what it was we wanted. Nobody wanted any part of it. So we went to

California.....and found the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the

IHM's. They agreed to let us come into their schools and work with their

normal faculty, and with their normal students, and influence the

development of normal Catholic family life. It was a disaster."

 

"The IHM's were pretty progressive, but some of the leadership was a little

bit nervous about the secular psychologist from La Jolla coming in; and so I

met with the whole community, some 600 nuns gathered in the Immaculate Heart

High School gymnasium in Hollywood on an April day in 1967. We've already

done the pilot study, we told them. Now we want to get everybody in the

system involved in nondirective self-exploration. We call it encounter

groups. I showed them a film of the encounter group; and it looked pretty

holy. The people in that film seemed to be better people at the end of the

session than they were when they began. They were more open with one

another, they were less deceitful, they didn't hide their judgments from one

another; if they didn't like one another they were inclined to say so; and

if they were attracted to one another they were inclined to say that too. So

they went along with us, and they trusted us, and that is partly my

responsibility, because they thought, 'These people wouldn't hurt us; the

project coordinator is a Catholic.'"

 

"Rogers and I and eventually 58 others: we had 60 facilitators. We inundated

that system with humanistic psychology. We called it therapy for normals."

 

And the results of the project?

 

"There's a tragic book called Lesbian Nuns, Breaking Silence, which

documents part of our effect on the IHM's and other orders that engaged in

similar experiments in 'sensitivity" or 'encounter.' In a chapter of Lesbian

Nuns, one former Immaculate Heart nun describes the summer of 1966 when we

did the pilot study in her order. Sister Mary Benjamin got involved with us

and became the victim of a lesbian seduction. An older nun in the group,

'freeing herself to be more expressive of who she really was internally,'

decided that she wanted to make love to Sister Mary Benjamin. Well, Sister

Mary Benjamin engaged in this; and then she was stricken with guilt, and

wondered, to quote from her book, 'Was I doing something wrong, was I doing

something terrible? I talked to a priest--' Unfortunately, we had talked to

him first. "I talked to a priest,' she says, 'who refused to pass judgment

on my actions. He said it was up to me to decide if they were right or

wrong. He opened a door, and I walked through the door, realizing I was on

my own.' This is her liberation. Now, her parents had not delivered her to

the IHM's in order for her to be on her own. She was precious to them. She

described the day in 1962 when they drove her in the station wagon to

Montecito, to the IHM's novitiate. How excited they were to be delivering

someone into God's hands! Well, instead they delivered her into the hands of

nondirective psychology."

 

The IHM's had some 60 schools when we started; at the end, they had one.

There were some 615 nuns when we began. Within a year after our first

interventions, 300 of them were petitioning Rome to get out of their vows.

They did not want to be under anyone's authority, except the authority of

their imperial inner selves."

 

"There are (still) some retired (IHM) nuns living in the mother house in

Hollywood, there is a small group of radical feminists who run a center for

feminist theology in a storefront in Hollywood. There are a few of them in

Wichita whom I visited recently, who are going to make a go of it as

traditional teaching nuns, and there are a few doing the same in Beverly

Hills. There may be a couple dozen left altogether, apart from whom, kaput,

they are gone. The college campus was sold. There is no more Immaculate

Heart College. It doesn't exist. It ceased to function because of our good

offices. One mother pulled her daughter out before it closed, saying,

'Listen, she can lose her faith for free at the state college.'"

 

"Our grant had been for three years, but we called off the study after two,

because we were alarmed about the results. We thought we could make the

IHM's better than they were; and we destroyed them.The proof of

authenticity on the humanistic psychology model is to go against what you

were trained to be, to call all of that phoniness, and to say what is

deepest within you. What's deepest within you, however, are certain

unrequited longings, including sexual longings. We provoked an epidemic of

sexual misconduct among clergy and therapists."

 

How did Carl Rogers respond to the results of his non-directive therapy?

 

"I'll tell you what Rogers came to see, and he came to see it pretty

quickly, because he really loved those women. They were a wonderful order,

unconventional in the best sense, for example going around in their old

habits playing Mozart for Catholic school kids; and that doesn't exist

anymore. I am going to quote him (Rogers) in a tape that he and I made in

'76: 'I left there feeling, Well, I started this damned thing, and look

where it's taking us; I don't even know where it's taking me. I don't have

any idea what's going to happen next. And I woke up the next morning feeling

so depressed, that I could hardly stand it. And then I realized what was

wrong. Yes, I started this thing, and now look where it's carrying us. Where

is it going to carry us? And did I start something that is in some

fundamental way mistaken, and will lead us off into paths that we will

regret?'"

 

And what about psychotherapy in general?

 

Psychology today is predominantly therapeutic psychology; and in that sense

antithetical (to morals and values), because in therapy, you don't ever want

to tell a person how they should be, particularly in the moral dimension, or

they will never reveal to you how bad things are from that perspective. I

see therapy as being fundamentally opposed to the civilized life. It's a

little bit like asking a competent pianist what he's doing with his fingers.

In the course of the answer, the music stops, because he doesn't know what

he's doing with his fingers. And in order to analyze it, the music has to

stop. If civilization is a kind of music, it stops when everybody gets

therapy. Unfortunately, we assume now that everybody needs to get therapy."

 

"You remember Maslow coined the term "the third force" for humanistic

psychology. But Maslow quickly came to see that there was something on the

horizon which he called the fourth force. It has since come to be known as

transpersonal psychology. It's the fastest growing field of psychology, but

it is primarily New Ageism, because it doesn't want to endorse traditional

religious faith. It is psychology trying to be religion, because it

understands that humanistic orientation is inadequate."

 

 

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Endnotes

 

Having abandoned his once lucrative career, Dr. William Coulson now lectures

to Catholic and Protestant groups on the dangers of psychotherapy, with a

particular emphasis upon the "encounter group" dynamic.

 

To hear Dr. Coulson tell his story, be sure to order Issues, Etc. tape

number 2-001: "A Dangerous Trip: The Encounter Dynamic."