On psychology, empathy and our new ‘Age of Anxiety’
Seventy years ago this Saturday, the profession of psychology suffered one of its greatest political defeats in Albany.
On April 10, 1951, Gov. Thomas Dewey vetoed a bill that would have set a new standard for the regulation of psychologists. At the time, psychologists nationwide were largely unregulated
▶ James Schlett of Colonie is the author of “Frontier Struggles: Rollo May and the Little Band of Psychologists Who Saved Humanism,” forthcoming from the University of Akron Press in fall 2021.
and unable to expel from their ranks the quacks preying on people in what the poet W. H. Auden dubbed “The Age of Anxiety.”
Dewey’s veto was influenced by the American Psychiatric Association and the Medical Society of the State of New York. Shortly afterward, these groups, with the American Medical Association, attempted to add any “mental condition” to the definition of the “practice of medicine.” In response, a small band of New York psychologists fought back against psychiatrists’ attempts to codify this view of people as “physical machines.” The fight these psychologists mustered stood in defense of a humanistic view that embraces the integrity of the self and is now long forgotten, but it is worth remembering in this new age of anxiety under COVID-19.
Those suffering from depression and anxiety were “medically sick people, totally sick people and not just psychologically ‘maladjusted,’” the American Psychiatric Association’s medical
director, Daniel Blain, told Dewey days before the veto. Psychologists lacked biological training and could not be trusted to independently evaluate and totally treat “emotionally upset or nervous” individuals, Blain argued. However, even Freud believed “the practice of psychoanalysis calls much less for medical training than for psychological instruction and a free human outlook.”
The tide turned for New York psychologists when Rollo May, a pioneer of American existential psychology, emerged as the leader of their campaign in 1952. He was a pastor-turned-psychologist whose theories on anxiety continue to shape our understanding of it today.
May’s mentor, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, called the estrangement from the self the “present crisis in civilization.” So, when organized medicine attempted to control psychotherapy by amending the Medical Practice Act in 1953 and 1954, May warned, “If we simply continue emphasizing that man is a physical machine, we produce only more effective soldiers and our civilization will indeed be threatened.”
The psychologists did not deny the biological aspects of mental conditions or that psychiatrists had a role in treating them. Instead, May said, “The battle for health must be won on the deeper level of the integration of self.”
New York psychologists won their war when Gov. W. Averell Harriman enacted a law regulating their profession in 1956. However, when he assessed this victory shortly before his death in 1994, May saw psychologists facing “dangers similar to those faced by the AMA before us.” That danger was in the tendency to “lose our sensitivity” and “to take refuge in definitions, putting aside our awareness that every moment in psychotherapy is distinctive and needs to be seen new.”
Today, the danger is much broader in scope, with more than these professions taking refuge in definitions. May said, “We won our battle against the whole AMA … because people underneath realized that we had something to give that wasn’t the customary, technical prescribing but rather it was hearing human beings, and this turned out to be more important than the standardized training.” Empathy became psychologists’ secret weapon in their battle of the professions, and it can be ours in the battle for health today.