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"Humanistic psychology" is a term which, after two decades of persistent invocation, still has a dramatic resonance. While its denotative meaning is, if anything, even less clear today than in 1960 (as the present volume strongly attests), its connotations are vivid, rich, and evocative. For most nonprofessionals, I suspect, the term conjures up a movement rather more social than psychological, springing from the youthful counterculture of the late 1960s and descending into the "me generation" and "culture of narcissism" of the 1970s. In this popular misconstruction of the term, humanistic psychology is the intellectual and moral armor of the Human Potential Movement. Its emphasis is insistently on the self—self-expression, self-actualization, self-gratification—and its credo is graphically conveyed by the notorious proclamation of the late Fritz Perls which adorned the walls of a generation of the self-absorbed: "I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I. And if by chance we find each other it's beautiful."

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4684-1071-6_13

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