Furthermore, there is reason to believe that Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, the founders of the humanistic school and themselves the chief proponents of the therapeutic relationship, rather than purporting to profess "gospel," recognized the function of humanistic theory-as a heuristic guide to the search for processes of change. For example, Rogers (1965) prefaced the formulation of his "Client-Centered Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships" by stating:

I believe that there is only one statement which can accurately apply to all theories ... from the one I will present to the one I hope will replace it in a decade-and that is that at the time of its formulation, every theory contains an unknown. . . . To me this attitude is important, for I am distressed at the manner in which small-caliber minds immediately accept a theory-almost any theory-as a dogma of truth. If theory could be seen for what it is--a fallible, changing attempt to construct a network of gossamer threads which will contain the solid facts--then a theory would serve as it should, as a stimulus to fm1her creative thinking. (p. 472)

And the similar view ofMaslow (1970): In the past, as we have said, the character structure of the therapist was far more important than any theories he held, or even more important than the conscious techniques that he used. But this must become less and less so as technical therapy becomes more and more sophisticated. In the total picture of the good psychotherapist, bis character structure for the last decade or two has slowly receded in importance and will almost certainly continue to do so in the future, while his training, his intelligence, his techniques, his theories have steadily become more important until, we may rest assured, some time in the future they will become all-important. (p. 260)

Like Rogers and Maslow, Freud, too, as a neurologist and neuroanatomist by training, believed until his death, according to Gardner (1993), that "all psychic mechanisms must have a material basis" (p. 68) as he searched for physiological grounding ofhis psychoanalytic constructs. In fact, Gardner maintains that in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology," Freud attempted to fOlmulate a comprehensive framework or theory of human behavior wh ich would include normal, abnormal, conscious, and unconscious phenomena. Gardner further quotes Freud, who defined the purpose ofhis "Project" as being: "To fumish a psychology that shall be a natural science; that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively detenninate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction" (p. 66).