THE DARK SIDE OF THE HUMAN POTENTIAL MOVEMENT

This is a cautionary tale for those interested in “personal growth.” Our son Daniel suggested we listen to the six-part podcast The Good Cult (2022). In it, River Donaghey tells the story of Lifespring Inc, a personal growth company. John Hanley founded Lifespring in 1974 and dissolved it in the mid-1990s.

Lifespring, like Neuro-Semantics, was an offshoot of the Human Potential Movement. In the 1940s, Abraham Maslow broke from psychology’s focus on studying the worst in people. Instead of studying mental illness, he studied what made people thrive. He said, What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization… This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. Maslow’s ideas, and the work of others, led in the 1970s to the Human Potential Movement.