A Teacher
Anthony Sutich
Midwife of the third and fourth forces in psychology
The transmission
Anthony “Tony” Sutich was an American psychologist and editor who, working closely with Abraham Maslow, helped institutionalize two successive movements in twentieth-century psychology: humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology.
Quadriplegic from his teens after a sports injury and confined to a gurney for most of his adult life, Sutich nonetheless became a practicing therapist and an extraordinary organizer of people and ideas. In 1961 he founded and edited the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, giving the emerging “third force”—a movement opposed to the determinism of behaviorism and psychoanalysis—its first scholarly home and helping convene the network that became the Association for Humanistic Psychology.
By the late 1960s Sutich and Maslow concluded that humanistic psychology had not gone far enough in addressing transcendence, peak experience, and the spiritual dimensions of human life. In 1967–69, in dialogue with Maslow, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Miles Vich, and others, Sutich helped name and define a “fourth force,” transpersonal psychology, and in 1969 he founded and edited the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, writing one of the field’s first formal definitions in its inaugural issue.
He received his doctorate on the final day of his life in April 1976. For mind-power and manifestation culture, Sutich is a pivotal connective figure: he built the editorial and institutional channels through which a scientifically framed language of self-actualization, higher states, and consciousness flowed into the wider human-potential and self-development world.
What they gave
Founding the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (1961): Gave the “third force” its first scholarly platform and helped catalyze the Association for Humanistic Psychology.
- Co-founding transpersonal psychology: With Maslow and Grof, helped name and define the “fourth force” devoted to transcendence, peak experience, and spiritual dimensions of mind.
- Founding the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (1969): Created the field’s flagship journal and authored an early formal definition of transpersonal psychology.
- Editorial midwifery of a movement: Connected academic psychology to the human-potential world, channeling a respectable vocabulary of growth and higher consciousness into self-development culture.
In their words
The two Big Sur seminars triggered a reconsideration of my primary commitment to humanistic psychology. I felt that something was lacking in the orientation, and that it did not adequately accommodate the depths of the cultural turn toward the ‘inner-personal’ world or give sufficient attention to the place of man in the universe or cosmos.
A special problem was my growing realization that the concept of self-actualization was no longer comprehensive enough.
My longstanding interest in the psychological aspects of mystical experience continued to provoke disturbing questions about basic humanistic theory.
I already felt that both humanistic and transpersonal psychology had reached the point at which they were already independent, evolving, self-developing orientations and that given mutual cooperation their long-run influence would be incalculable.
The line they stand in
Sutich worked in close intellectual partnership with Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs, self-actualization, and peak-experience research supplied much of the conceptual content that Sutich organized into movements; the two jointly steered humanistic psychology toward its transpersonal successor.
He drew on the wider human-potential ferment centered at Esalen and on collaborators such as Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, and Miles Vich.
Through the two journals he founded, Sutich influenced the entire transpersonal field, the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, and the broader currents of consciousness studies, spiritual psychology, and self-development that feed contemporary manifestation and mind-power culture.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Readings in Humanistic Psychology1969
- Transpersonal Psychology: An Emerging Force1968