ABSTRACT
This book marks Wilson’s brief return to his original publisher Victor Gollancz after an absence of nine years. It was published in the UK in May 1972 and in the US by Taplinger Publishing Company the same year. In an article written to promote a new book, Super Consciousness (see Chapter Nine), in 2009, Colin Wilson wrote:
One day in the spring of 1963 I received one of the most important letters of my life. It was from a professor of psychology named Abraham Maslow, and he wanted to tell me about some researches he had been carrying out for the past ten years or so.
This, written nearly forty years after Maslow’s death in 1970, reveals how important Wilson considers his association with the American psychologist has been and how much it has helped to reinforce his own ideas about the nature of human consciousness. It was, as the extract suggests, Maslow who made the initial contact:Four years after the publication of my book The Age of Defeat—under the title The Stature of Man—I had received a letter from Maslow. … 20He explained that he had been impressed by the optimism of The Stature of Man, and about the way I had pinpointed the sense of defeat that permeates our culture.
Maslow had begun to have certain doubts about Freudian psychology, feeling it had “sold human nature short”. This was something I had felt strongly for years: Freud’s view that all our deepest urges are sexual seemed to me to leave out some of the most important members of the human race, from Leonardo to Bernard Shaw …
(Wilson, 2003, p. 208) The book is divided into three parts, with a lengthy introductory chapter outlining the ideas that Wilson and Maslow have in common. Part one provides a history of the major trends in psychology from its beginnings, through Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) to Maslow. Part two deals exclusively with Maslow and part three discusses existential psychology in general.