The field of self-help psychology, as it developed in the 20th century, is rooted in a fundamental tension regarding human nature and the role of society in shaping individual well-being.
This tension crystallised in the opposing views of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, whose differing perspectives laid the groundwork for subsequent movements aimed at personal transformation and societal change.
Freud vs Reich
Sigmund Freud, a pivotal figure in Psychoanalysis, believed human beings were fundamentally driven by primitive animal instincts.
In this view, society's primary function is to repress and control these inherent, potentially dangerous forces. This approach aimed to foster a contained, proper populace, less prone to intense emotional lives.
In stark contrast, Wilhelm Reich, an early disciple of Freud in Vienna during the 1920s, challenged this foundational premise. Reich argued that the unconscious forces within the human mind were inherently good, and it was society's repression of these forces that led to distortion and rendered individuals dangerous.
Reich believed that the core natural impulse was the libido, or sexual energy. If this energy were released, human beings would naturally flourish.
Reich’s personal life and theories were notably and disturbingly degenerate. His diaries detailed a litany of perverse sexual experiences from a very young age, including an attempt to sleep with the family maid at four, fascinations with watching animals copulate, pleasuring himself while whipping horses, and almost daily "encounters" with servants from age eleven.
He frequently visited brothels from age fifteen and developed intense erotic fantasies for his mother. At age twelve, deeply unsettled by his mother's affair with a family tutor, Reich conceived a plan to blackmail her into sleeping with him, though he abandoned this idea. He eventually informed his father, leading to his mother's suicide after being beaten by the father. Later in life, Reich was associated with several women who died by suicide.
Reich’s central theory posited that orgasm would cure all neurotic entanglements, becoming the focus of his work and positioning him as a progenitor of the sexual escapades associated with the 1960s and 1970s counter-culture. He believed that unreleased psychosexual energy could manifest as physical blockages and tension, forming what he termed "body armour".
His ideas brought him into direct conflict not only with Freud but also with Freud’s daughter - Anna Freud - who maintained that human sexual forces were dangerous if left uncontrolled. Anna Freud, who was analysed by her father due to masturbation and violent fantasies, never had a sexual relationship with a man, presenting a stark ideological opposition to Reich’s advocacy for sexual freedom.
The conflict culminated in 1934 at a conference in Switzerland, where Anna Freud, who by then the acknowledged leader of the psychoanalytic movement, successfully manoeuvred to have Reich expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association, effectively destroying his career. Reich fled to the United States, where his ideas grew increasingly grandiose.
He believed he had discovered the source of libidinal energy, which he termed orgone energy. He constructed a "cloudbuster," a giant gun he claimed could capture orgone from the atmosphere to produce rain and destroy UFOs.
In 1956, Reich was arrested by federal authorities for selling a device, the "orgone accumulator," which he claimed cured cancer. Treated as a madman, his works were burnt by court order, and he died in prison in 1957.
The Rise of the Human Potential Movement
Despite Freudians believing Reich’s threat was removed, his ideas experienced a dramatic resurgence in America and the Western world. In the 1950s, a small group of renegade psychoanalysts in New York City began a new form of therapy, encouraging patients to openly express suppressed feelings like screaming, crying, and anger.
This feminised emphasis on emotional externalisation was applied to men, for whom it is neither necessarily nor healthy, and for whom should find catharsis in quiet contemplation rather than endless emotional discharge.
This movement challenged societal norms that struggle with the concept of finality and loss. Modern society, particularly influenced by communicative capitalism and social media, often fosters an 'eternal now' where people remain perpetually connected and dependent on systems, unable to envisage their absence. In contrast, personal growth and self-reconstruction necessitate accepting loss, moving on from emotional episodes, and allowing new experiences to emerge, leading to a stronger sense of self.
American emotionalism, though often seen as ingrained, is actually a more recent development, contrasting with the historically buttoned up and reserved WASP establishment and Puritan settlers who exhibited a more uptight social demeanour.
A key institution in this burgeoning movement was The Esalen Institute, a tiny old motel on the remote coast of California, which became a centre for personal liberation. Here, psychotherapists developed techniques based on Reich’s ideas, aiming to free individuals from controls implanted by society. Fritz Perls, trained by Reich, became a dominant figure at Esalen.
He developed a form of group encounter where he pushed individuals to publicly express feelings that society had deemed dangerous and repressed. This technique, known as "getting on the hot seat," encouraged individuals to acknowledge and activate the ID, a raw, uncontrollable force of violence and sexual impulses.
Participants were encouraged to own this inner Demon, equating personal autonomy with the release of these childlike rages and sexual urges.
The Human Potential Movement quickly became a magnetic force, expanding from an obscure fringe institute to a national movement with around 200 centres in America within eight years, primarily looking to Esalen for leadership. Its core belief was the inseparability of personal and social transformation.
The leaders at Esalen attempted to apply their techniques to solve broader social problems.
Racial Confrontation Groups
Esalen organised encounter groups for White and Black radicals, encouraging them to express feelings instilled by society, with the aim of transcending those feelings and encountering each other as individuals.
These "racial confrontation as transcendental experience" workshops were designed to confront racial prejudice directly, rather than through polite evasion.
However, these naive encounters were - predictably - catastrophic. Black radicals interpreted the process as an insidious attempt to dismantle their power by transforming them into "liberated individuals," thereby stripping them of their collective identity as black people, which was a source of strength in their anti-racism struggle.
The Immaculate Heart Convent Experiment
The Human Potential Movement then turned its attention to nuns, believing they could benefit from personal transformation due to their identities being deeply defined by external rules.
At the Convent of the Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles, psychotherapists initiated week-long encounter workshops for hundreds of nuns. Reserved nuns were encouraged to "let it all out," "assert yourself," and discard their habits in favour of ordinary clothes, in the name of discovering their "true" selves beyond their religious roles.
This demonic experiment led to a cataclysmic transformation within the convent, as it unleashed what they called "Sexual Energy" which the church had previously restrained. One sister seduced a classmate and then the Mistress of novices, an older, very reserved woman, through a sex-focused program of "freeing"(corrupting) this older woman.
Within a year, 300 nuns, over half the convent, petitioned the Vatican to be released from their vows, and the convent closed its doors six months later. The nuns became "radical lesbian nuns". The movement portrayed this as the nuns becoming "persons," implying they were incomplete or less than human prior to this "liberation", or more aptly their Fall.
Following violent state repression against the new left in America, such as the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the Kent State killings, many radicals shifted tactics. Unable to overthrow the state, they instead sought to remove societal controls implanted within their own minds. This led to the notion that individual self-change would spontaneously transform society, popularising the slogan: "the personal became political".
Leaning into their Passions, not denying them.
This Hippie Movement period was viewed as a Boomer disillusionment, where radical impulses were internalised and dissipated by the system, leading to the current progressive cultural landscape.
The spread of self-help psychology profoundly influenced Consumerism. By the late 1950s, psychoanalysis was deeply embedded in American advertising, with companies employing psychoanalysts and utilising focus groups to uncover and appeal to consumers' hidden unconscious desires. This led to the forensic manipulation of consumer desire and the emergence of a "greedy self" increasingly susceptible to business and political influence.
In the mid-1960s, a protest movement on American campuses attacked corporate America, accusing it of brainwashing the public and using Consumerism to keep the masses docile during the Vietnam War.
Herbert Marcuse, a radical philosopher from the Frankfurt School, was a mentor to these students. He criticised Freudians for inadvertently creating a world where individuals expressed feelings and identities through mass-produced objects, resulting in the "one-dimensional man" – conformist and repressed.
Marcuse argued that psychoanalysts had become corrupt agents of the American ruling structure, manipulating the unconscious primary drives stipulated by Freud. Arguing the radical individualism often associated with current societal issues is more attributable to liberal philosophies than to Cultural Marxism.
The commodification of self-expression was further elucidated by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay "The White Negro." Mailer observed that fears of nuclear annihilation produced a new type of alienated, hyper-individualistic young American who trusted only their own feelings and desires, rejecting group affiliations and finding identity in outsider cultures, particularly Black culture.
This phenomenon expanded in the 1970s to include gay culture, and by the 1980s, this Bohemian individualism became a driving force for consumer capitalism, offering "hipsters" objects to express their "rebellious difference".
In the 21st Century we can say that contemporary society has indeed largely become populated by fake and gay White Negroes, where supposed rebellion has devolved into a new form of conformity.
The contrast between Soviet and American Propaganda highlights this subtlety. Soviet propaganda was crude, with overt slogans like "Communism is vigor and loyalty," which alienated the youth. American advertising, however, is far more subtle, creating a pervasive sense of disempowerment without overt coercion. This insidious nature is a much greater threat than more obvious enemies.
The Individual and the Market
The self-help movement progressed to new expressions of individuality. Werner Erhard introduced EST (Erhard Seminars Training), a system where hundreds of people attended weekend sessions to learn "how to be themselves".
Erhard criticised the human potential movement, not for being disenchanted from God, Truth and virtue, but for not going far enough - asserting that there was no fixed self or central core to be discovered.
Tabula Rasa: Existence precedes Essence
Instead, he proposed that one "could be anything that you wanted to be," implying an infinite capacity for self-invention. EST sessions were known for their intensity and brutality, requiring participants to sign contracts agreeing not to leave and to permit trainers to break down their "socially constructed" identities.
This process, which Erhard likened to peeling an onion, aimed to reveal that at the last layer, there was "nothing," leading to a recognition of existential meaninglessness - nihilism - but also "enormous freedom" to invent oneself.
Satan's message: YOU are the centre of it ALL
This Crowlian philosophy of self-creation, where only the individual matters and personal satisfaction is your highest Duty, finds parallels in Thatcherism and Reaganism, which promoted individual freedom and reduced government interference, with the free market serving as the conduit for this self-expression.
Modern Capitalism, aided by computer networks, uses feedback loops and pattern recognition to understand consumer desires. This reveals that despite the insistence of individualism, people are actually far more similar to each other than we might think, especially in our desires.
This phenomenon, of management by the algorithm, allows corporations to cater to mass individualistic desires, which ironically leading to a widespread conformity where acts of rebellion, such as tattoos, nose rings and dying hair blue, have not only become common but signify group belonging.
The underlying human desire is for belonging, Conformity, and routine, rather than radical individuality. The aspirational drive pushed by modern society, wherein everyone is encouraged to become a cognitive elite, is unnatural to most human life, which historically has been settled and content with limited horizons.
Lifestyle Marketing
In the 1970s, the life insurance industry observed a concerning trend: fewer college students were buying life insurance, indicating a challenge to the Protestant ethic, which valued sacrifice for the future.
Daniel Yankelovich, a leading market researcher, discovered that the core reason was a burgeoning preoccupation with "self-expressiveness" and the "inner self". These "new expressive selves" were consumers, but they sought products that would express their individuality and difference rather than conforming to societal strata. This shift prompted the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to develop a rigorous tool to measure these unpredictable desires.
Based on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which describes emotional stages of liberation culminating in "self-actualisation" (complete self-direction and freedom from society), SRI categorised society not by social class but by psychological desires and drives.
Their system, called VALS (Values and Lifestyles), identified various types. At the top were the "inner directeds" , people who felt defined by their choices rather than social status, characterised as self-expressive, complex, and individualistic. This group transcended traditional social classes and was elusive to conventional polling methods. Another type identified was the "experientials," those seeking inner growth through direct experience, embracing a "try anything once" mentality.
VALS enabled businesses and the state to identify which groups bought their products and to market goods as "powerful emblems of those group's inner values and Lifestyles," moving beyond mere demographics to target "underlying motivations". This marked the beginning of lifestyle marketing.
Political Predictability
Remarkably, VALS also demonstrated an ability to predict political choices. SRI testing showed that the message of individual freedom championed by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain would appeal directly to the "inner directeds" at the top of their hierarchy.
Despite colleagues dismissing the idea that socially aware inner directeds would vote conservative, the VALS surveys accurately predicted their support, showing that these individuals, across all walks of life, would vote for Thatcher and Reagan because the message resonated with their self-perception as individuals.
The "Triumph of the Self" and its Aftermath
The explosion of desire, fuelled by the notion of an infinite self, led to a seemingly never-ending consumer boom that regenerated the American economy.
The original vision of self-liberation would create a new people who would challenge state power vanished. Instead, it evolved into an pervasive idea that individuals could find happiness solely within themselves, rendering societal change irrelevant.
Figures like Jerry Rubin, an original hippie leader who had once embraced political activism, underwent EST training and subsequently abandoned his martyr complex and overwhelming concern for injustice, choosing to reincarnate himself from within, thereby replacing politics with a lifestyle focused on deepening the self.
The notion that you could buy an identity replaced the earlier aspiration of freely creating an identity and changing the world.
Modern industrial production, enabled by computers, could economically produce short runs of goods, catering to the unlimited, and ever changing needs of the self-expressive consumer, removing the old worry of supply outstripping demand. However, this is a pathetic idea of individuality, where meaningless symbols on mass-produced items, becoming avatars for personal uniqueness, by creating an "artificial scarcity mindset".
The self, once envisioned as infinite, was shown to be a fantasy. Corporations realised that encouraging people to feel like unique individuals, and then offering them ways to express that individuality through consumption, was not a threat but rather their greatest opportunity.
This marked the triumph of a certain self, one where moral judgment and all aspects of the world were viewed through the lens of personal satisfaction. This logic, disconnected to Christ, alienated and atomised - following this logic to it's conclusion would mean that that there is no society, only a collection of individual people making individual choices to promote their own individual well-being.