Hippie Shit: What Modern Therapy Owes the 1960s Counterculture

When you think about the history of psychotherapy, what comes to mind? Perhaps it’s Sigmund Freud. There he sits enshrined in our cultural consciousness, a shrewd old fellow jotting notes at a brisk pace, while some faceless patient lies on the couch. Would it surprise you to hear that the spirit of modern therapy is just as much or more directly influenced by 1960s counterculture? Beginning in the early 1960s, the nascent hippie movement rubbed shoulders with academic psychotherapy and changed the mental health field forever.  Put aside that image of the good doctor and replace it with a bunch of naked hippies in a hot spring. Smush them together and you’ve got modern therapy. 

Two residents of the Esalen Institute walking down to its famous clothing-optional hot springs overlooking the California coastline, circa 1962.

What captures my imagination about the 1960s is the counterculture’s own extravagant imagination. Small movements popped up like mushrooms after a rain, rallying around unorthodox practices that claimed life could be better if you would only open your mind. This roil spurred lived experiments in domains as central and diverse as relationship and family structures, work and labor, foodways, and spirituality; as well as in the realm of mental health and wellbeing. Wellness culture of the 1960s proclaimed that personal internal awareness underpins all wellbeing, and advocated practices to gain this awareness that integrated body, mind, interpersonal, and spiritual wellbeing. These ideas continue to reverberate in both popular and professional understanding of mental health today.

The center of the 1960s integrated wellness movement was the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Founded in 1962 and still in existence today, Esalen rallied the counterculture while drawing deeply from academic and intellectual reservoirs, especially from nearby Stanford . The Esalen Institute soon emerged as one part hippie-academic think tank and one part community wellness retreat center. Fundamental to its identity is the principle that “no one captures the flag”, ie that no guru or discipline establish dominance over the others. Indeed, the roster of past teachers and speakers represents this radical openness, with a brief sample including Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley,  Alan Watts, Joan Baez, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsburg, Ray Bradbury, and Susan Sontag.

The legendary and Seussical grounds of Esalen. Photo credit Brad Coy, Flickr.

Psychotherapy in particular flourished in this crossroads of the serious and the wildly experimental, with Esalen’s teachers from the field reading like a syllabus from my grad school years: Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, B.F. Skinner, Fritz Perls, and Virginia Satir, to name a few. One of the Institute’s two founders, Dick Price, brought in a passion for challenging existing systems of mental health care inspired by his own involuntary commitment to an asylum for a year following a manic episode. Writer Aldous Huxley, who was an early influence and teacher at Esalen, bequeathed a name on the grassroots phenomenon of self-improvement that Esalen inspired: The Human Potential Movement.

The Human Potential Movement began in Esalen but soon spread across the country, ultimately numbering 150-200 centers throughout the United States. These united a broad swath of seekers under a common manifesto: a) that because of societal repression, most people were only using a small portion of their ultimate potential––but never fear! Because  b) one could unlock heretofore concealed levels of wisdom and wellbeing by way of various practices that evoked personal insight. Areas of inquiry ranged from the respectably esoteric (philosophy, creative arts, religious studies, communication techniques, psychotherapy [!], massage, acupuncture) to the downright out there (ESP, psychedelic drugs, transcendental dancing, astral projection, primitivist practices that encouraged one to “play like the bonobos” or “writhe on the ground like a newt.”) The only requirement was an eternally open mind.

Austin boasts its very own Human Potential Center!

Simultaneously, the clinical mental field was already fizzing with its own declarative challenges to established models of wellbeing and therapy. Starting in the 1950s, a new “Third Force” of humanistic psychology challenged the two prevailing models of the time, psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Humanistic psychology was the more polished and erudite analog to the Human Potential Movement’s scruffy masses, but with many of the same values. Humanistic therapists and researchers believed in democratizing the therapy room by privileging the client’s own experiences and priorities above the analyst’s interpretations and theories. Psychoanalysis and behaviorism, they argued, enacted social control and repression onto clients, effectively trying to stuff individuals into the roles that society had made for them, and lop off any pieces that didn’t fit.

Instead, humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers encouraged therapists to focus on elements of process that would help clients best explore their issues, such as his famous three “core conditions” of empathy, authenticity, and warmth. Abraham Maslow oriented therapy away from assumptions that the role of psychotherapy was to help “sick” clients attain health through being able to socially conform. His famous Hierarchy of Needs culminates in “self-actualization” and ultimately “transcendence.” While this raises no eyebrows today, at the time it was revolutionary to suggest that instead of helping people to adjust to their roles in society, therapy should instead privilege the individual’s freedom to pursue their own fulfillment and inspiration.

Whenever I read anything about Carl Rogers I get Fred aka “Mr.” Rogers vibes of the “what-a-genuinely-nice-man” variety.

But let’s be real: it got weird. There is an inevitable dark side to a subculture that encourages experimentation with no boundaries. Neither of the following examples are meant to condemn the figures or practices associated with them, but to show that rigidity and dogmatism can be just as harmful with exciting new ideas as with traditional ones.

  Central to Esalen was Fritz Perls, the creator of Gestalt Therapy and an advocate of so called “encounter groups” which brought participants together to gain insight by sharing and receiving honest interpersonal feedback. Perls at his best was a gifted therapist whose theatrical bravado broke through many tough shells; but his confrontational style could also be abrasive and as he himself said “obnoxious.” His groups encouraged intense honesty between members that could provoke sudden insight, but also left many participants psychologically torn to shreds. A subsequent research project at the University of California Berkeley found two suicides connected to members whose psyches were overwhelmed by the groups’ intensity. Perls acknowledged taking LSD on a weekly basis during some of his time at Esalen. Other accounts include several instances of his becoming involved in physical fisticuffs with patients, and at a party of Hollywood stars even laying actress Natalie Wood over his knee and spanking her, all somehow in the name of therapy.

Fritz Perls holding court. Shit got wild, y’all.

Another controversial player on the stage of 1960s mental health was the antipsychiatry movement. Antipsychiatry advocates denounced the validity of the psychiatric establishment altogether, as well as its diagnostic categories, medication, and treatment approaches. They believed that psychiatry constitutes an inherently demeaning and at times brutal denial of an individual’s own spontaneous healing process. Brutal historic practices such as lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and involuntary confinement were pointed to as evidence, which indeed ruined unknown numbers of lives. However, the blanket rejection of psychiatric medication and treatment ultimately allowed a great deal of harm in the name of doing things differently at all costs.  The reckless use of psychedelics including LSD as a sort of replacement medicine, and the rejection of other treatments wholesale, were associated with several accidental deaths and suicides.

Culture and clinical practice co-influence one another. The 1960s emphasis on individuality, experimentation, and optimism shaped modern psychotherapy’s style and assumptions as we know them. Us therapists learned that we should listen to our clients, that there are many “right answers” as to what can offer healing, and that a dimension of vitality and joy beyond the simple absence of symptoms is possible for the vast majority of our clients. However, there are cautionary tales we should remember from this time too: that therapy is ultimately a vulnerable place, that mental health professionals need to maintain compassion and gentleness, and that we are doing our clients a disservice if we do not offer the  benefits of our clinical training and insight, so long as these are offered with respect for a patient’s ultimate choices. 

As a field we have arrived where we are by way of a strange and meandering path, and we are traveling still. I’m not sure if it’s possible to know how modern culture’s trajectory will influence the norms of mental health and therapy in the future, but we can see a few inklings. In recent years therapists have had to rapidly come up to speed with the culture’s changing understanding of how identity, marginalization, and injustice impact the client’s experience. The explosion of popular interest in autism and ADHD means we have also had to integrate a deeper understanding of what lived neurodiversity can look like. How will this period look in hindsight, though? What will its role in the Great Conversation of culture and psychotherapy be? That particular inflection of our understanding is not for us to have, at least, not yet.