Eupsychian Network II
(Page 2 of 9)
January/February 1971
By Dr. Henry Winthrop, Ph.D.
All of these modes of rejection of the system may be undramatic and limited in scope, but they can prove to be highly fruitful socially and culturally. Once they catch on, the system begins to lose its staying power. If healthy, new-type communities prove successful, they can become widely-known pilot models that create discontent with our present crazy forms of urbanization.
The psychologist, Abraham H. Maslow, 3 has coined the term, "Eupsychian," to apply to all individuals, ideas, movements, organizations, institutions, communities, books and periodicals, which strive to keep alive a sense of personal and social health, which tend to foster communal and spiritual values that enable men to realize their fullest potentialities, and which attempt to produce those social conditions and relationships which maximize the creative energies of man. Maslow has drawn up a list of Eupsychian groups, organizations and journals and distributed it—in the form of a mimeographed circular—to many American scholars. He refers to the 59 items on the list as "The Eupsychian Network" and he explains his use of the phrase this way:
"This is a mailing list of groups, organizations or journals that I made up for my own convenience. I call it the Eupsychian Network because they are all interested in helping the individual grow toward fuller humanness, and in helping the society grow toward synergy and health, and in helping all societies and all peoples move toward becoming one world and one species. This list can be called a network because their memberships overlap considerably and because they more or less share the humanistic and transhumanistic outlook on life. I feel they should know each other's work better than they now do. I've included only the ones I have something to do with, or know something about, so obviously this list reflects my tastes and interests . . . " (p.l)
Maslow's Eupsychian Network is an excellent list. It is, however, somewhat top-heavy with groups, organizations and periodicals in psychology and psychiatry. It does not, unfortunately, list a single experimental community. It contains fewer socially radical, religious groups than it should, considering the substantial number of them to be found throughout the world today. It does not mention any important source books for novel, anti-system social reconstruction or descriptions of successful community experiments in such reconstruction. In an effort to remove some of the limitations of The Eupsychian Network, I have, myself, drawn up a list of equally important items of a Eupsychian nature. For readers interested in the forms which small islands of defiance can take, when rejecting the pathologies of the present system, this new list will—I am sure—prove both valuable and interesting.
I have called my list, Eupsychian Network - II , and, I believe, a knowledge of these relatively unknown forms of rejection of our system should be more widespread. Merely to be familiar with some of the symposia literature of repudiation—such as has been published by Perrucci and Pilisuk, 4 Lindenfeld, 5 or Howe 6 —is not enough. It still leaves the reader facing a vital, inner gap in relating to others. Merely to steep oneself in literature—such as the work of Gettleman and Mermelstein 7 or Minogue 8 —provides a running account of the failures of liberalism, only deepens the feeling of emptiness. Nor will a spiritual justification for civil disobedience, such as was so fully espoused by Tolstoy, 9 eliminate the long loneliness which faces most intense critics and rejecters of our social system.
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