ABSTRACT
In March 1985, the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association joined the Association for Humanistic Psychology and the Saybrook Institute in sponsoring a conference in San Francisco, celebrating "A Quarter Century of Humanistic Psychologies." The publication in the 1930s of Karl Marx's early, partly Hegelian manuscripts was a major intellectual event, one that launched a major Marxist tradition of secular humanism, especially in Europe. The traditional mythic answers could not eliminate anguish and terror, but they could give it intelligible shape; they could make the blows of fate more bearable to the victim and more endurable to the members of the victim's kindred and community. They allowed life to go on quite satisfactorily between emergencies. These mythic systems typically drew a distinction between the commonplace objects and meanings of everyday life and sacred objects and meanings of transcendent power and value.
