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235 environment seemed to pull the organism to do things, needs for the self were always posited as being
served. All this to preserve the Freudian assumption of egoism even though the profession had abandoned
the biological premise that made this assumption necessary.
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3. Typical of this mindset is David C. McClelland's moving portrait of his mother-in-law, a strong,
warm, impressive woman who was active in improving race relations, in the peace movement and in
counselling, while giving emotional support to her large family... McClelland attributes this remarkable
245 woman's character with no slight intended — to a «need for power»; it is nothing but «the most advanced
stage of expressing the power drive»...
4.Once the psychologic mind locked onto the egoistic assumption, it couldn't seem to let go. These
250 psychologists even take evidence that seems to point in the opposite direction and use it to confirm their
case. Take, for example, the 1969 experiment in the New York City subway in which a man would stagger
and collapse to the floor of a car. Fellow passengers came spontaneously to the victim's aid 80 percent of
255 the time. In almost every case in which the passengers didn't offer assistance, the victim had been made to
appear drunk, but passengers helped in many of those cases anyway.
5.Given the level of civility that normally prevails in New York City's subways, such a study could be
260 encouraging evidence that an innate capacity for altruists does exist. How did the researchers interpret the
responses of the subway-riders? «A selfish desire to rid oneself of an unpleasant emotional state»...
Conditioned to find a cynical basis for people helping one another, such researchers become incapable of
seeing anything else.
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6. They generally don't even look for anything else. In the subway study, for example, the variable that
the researchers tested was the «cost» to the bystander of providing help by making some of the victims
270 appear drunk. What the researchers didn't do was put the shoe on the other foot and vary the cost to the
victim of not receiving help; to show, in other words, the victim in varying degrees of distress, to see
whether our generosity can increase, not in accordance with our own internal calculations of benefit, but in
275 accordance with another's need. One team of researchers conducted just such a study, and discovered that
drivers in a campus parking lot were more likely to give a stranger a ride to a town five miles away if the
situation seemed to be an emergency (64 per cent helped) than if it did not (45 per cent helped). What
280 mattered here, apparently, was the need of the recipient, and not the driver's calcu lation of cost to him or
herself. Yet on the whole, the psychology profession has framed its studies to give such possibilities short
shrift.
V. A REVIEW OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF EGOTISM-ORIENTED PSYCHOLOGICAL
THEORIES
1.
Freud, along with academic psychologists like these, erred on the side of cynicism. Tracing back all
285 motivation to «needs», whether biological or otherwise, they acknowledged nothing but narrow self-
interest from which behavior might arise. Th neo-Freudians and the humanistic psychologists, by
contrast..., sensed the heights to which humanity might rise. «It is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of
290 psychology», Maslow said, «and we must now fill it out with the healthy half».
2.
But the humanistic psychologists did more than fill out the healthy half. They seemed to forget about
the dark side completely. Freud at least had seen the value of social prescriptions and constraints in
295 enabling people to get along with one another. Where he erred was in seeing these as essentially hostile to
people, rather than as a form of training wheels by which their better instincts might be supported and
flourish. Rather than developing this theme, the humanists came to oppose prescriptions, constraints and
social institutions almost totally...
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3. For healthy individuals, said Rogers, «doing what «feels right» proves to be a competent and
trustworthy guide to behavior which is truly satisfying». Which is fine in theory. But what happens when
what is «truly satisfying», for you is in conflict with what is satisfying for — or needed by — someone
305 else? Take a mother who is an artist. She finds child care fulfilling, but painting even more so. Maslow and
Rogers imply that she should attend to her own maximum development and pursue artistic work regardless
310 of whether equally attentive arrangements can be made for her children. They would say that the woman
probably would be a bad mother if her personal development were jeopardized... That may well be true in
some cases. But should we not at least be open to the possibility that providing for our children's
315 «actualization» at a crucial time in their lives might take priority over our own — might, in fact, be what
we ourselves most deeply want?
4. Or take marriage, where the Maslow-Rogers prescriptions similarly is that self-actualization is the