James Bugental

Introduction

James Frederick Thomas Bugental (25 December 1915 – September 2008) was one of the founders of humanistic psychology and, with Rollo May, the creator of existential-humanistic psychotherapy. If May supplied the theory and the cultural criticism of the movement, Bugental supplied its practice: he spent more than fifty years trying to say precisely what a therapist actually does in the room, at a level of concreteness that the European existential tradition had largely left to intuition.

His subject was presence. Bugental's claim was that the decisive variable in therapy is not technique but the quality of attention and availability the therapist brings, and that a client's change is driven less by insight delivered than by the courage to stay present to what is actually happening, moment by moment, as it happens. Everything else he wrote — about resistance, about authenticity, about the stages of therapy — elaborates that one idea.

He was a clinician rather than an academic scientist, and he knew it. His evidence was his cases, and his books are full of transcripts rather than tables. That choice made him enormously influential among practising therapists and left him almost entirely outside the empirical mainstream that psychology became in his lifetime.

Early Life and Education

Bugental was born on Christmas Day 1915 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His family moved often during his childhood — Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, California — and the moves were not accompanied by prosperity. He described an upbringing made difficult by the family's financial setbacks and instability, and it is not hard to hear in his later writing a man who had early experience of how much a person's life is shaped by circumstances they did not choose.

He took his doctorate at Ohio State University in 1948, where he was influenced by Victor Raimy and by George Kelly. His dissertation, "An Investigation of the Relationship of the Conceptual Matrix to the Self-concept," already contained the preoccupations that stayed with him: how a person constructs the self they take themselves to be, and what it would mean to live from a construction that was actually their own.

Academic and Professional Career

After a brief period on the psychology faculty at UCLA, Bugental resigned in 1953 to do something unusual for the time: he founded the first group practice of psychotherapy, Psychological Service Associates, with Alvin Lasko. The group grew to include Tom Greening, Gerard Haigh and others, and out of it came a men's encounter group that met for decades, until 2006.

The publication of May's Existence in 1958 was the turning point. Bugental and his Los Angeles colleagues invited May out to run a training seminar, and the exchanges that followed produced The Search for Authenticity (1965), the book that made him a figure in his own right rather than a clinician with an interest.

He was at the centre of the institutional founding of humanistic psychology. With Abraham Maslow and others he co-founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1961, and served as the association's first president in 1962. His 1963 article in American Psychologist, "Humanistic Psychology: A New Breakthrough," set out the movement's basic assumptions for a mainstream audience. He was a leader of the Old Saybrook Conference of 1964, where personality psychologists such as Gordon Allport and Henry Murray met Maslow, Carl Rogers, May and Bugental to give the "third force" a shared identity.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 1955, was the first recipient of APA Division 32's Rollo May Award, was president of both the California State Psychological Association and the Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychology, received the Association for Humanistic Psychology's Pathfinder Award in 1991 and an honorary doctorate from Saybrook in 1993. He taught and gave workshops extensively through the 1980s and 1990s, was emeritus at Saybrook, and died at his home in Petaluma, California, in September 2008, aged 92.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Postulates of Humanistic Psychology

Bugental's most-quoted passage is his 1965 summary of what humanistic psychology assumes, a list often reproduced as the movement's creed:

Human beings cannot be reduced to components.
Human beings have in them a uniquely human context.
Human consciousness includes an awareness of oneself in the context of other people.
Human beings have choices and responsibilities.
Human beings are intentional; they seek meaning, value and creativity.

The list looks mild now, which is a measure of how much it won. In 1965 each clause was a rejection of something then dominant: of behaviourism's reduction of conduct to stimulus and response, of psychoanalysis's account of a person as the site of competing forces, and of a mainstream experimental psychology that had largely stopped asking what people want.

Therapeutic Presence

Bugental's own contribution is the attempt to make presence operable. He treated it not as warmth or sympathy but as a discipline: the therapist's deliberate, sustained effort to be fully available to the client's immediate experience, including the parts the client would rather not have witnessed and the parts the therapist would rather not witness either.

He wrote about the "presses" — the pulls and valences in a session that either increase or collapse presence: the pull to solve, to reassure, to interpret, to hide behind technique, to move to safer material. His practical advice was consistently about the therapist's own interior work first, on the grounds that a therapist who cannot stay present to their own experience cannot invite anyone else to stay present to theirs.

Working with Resistance

Bugental inverted the conventional clinical attitude toward resistance. Resistance, on his account, is not an obstacle the client erects against the therapist's good work; it is the client's most intelligent available protection against a change they are not yet able to survive, and it deserves respect rather than assault. The therapist's task is to attend to it closely enough that its purpose becomes visible, at which point the client can choose whether the protection is still needed.

This is where his method is most distinctive and most teachable: instead of arguing with a client's resistance, he would ask the client to describe it from the inside — to locate it in the body, to say what it is doing and what it is afraid would happen if it relaxed.

The Stage Model

Bugental described existential-humanistic therapy as passing through stages. The analytic stage uncovers and works through resistance, stripping away the layers behind which the client's central existential themes — finitude, the possibility of action, choice, isolation, the need for meaning — are concealed. The existential growth stage seeks actualisation: the client begins to live from a self they have chosen rather than one assembled for safety. He also gestured at a third, transcendent stage, about which he remained deliberately tentative, calling the understanding of it preliminary.

Against the Medical Model

He was emphatic that psychotherapy is not the treatment of illness. On his account the client is not a patient with a pathology but a person engaged in the unavoidable project of living, who has become blocked in ways that are usually intelligible given their history. The therapist is a companion on the journey rather than a technician applying a repair. This position put him at odds with the diagnostic, manual-driven direction that American mental health care took from the 1980s onward, and his last book is largely a polemic against it.

Major Publications

The Search for Authenticity: An Existential-Analytic Approach to Psychotherapy (1965)
Challenges of Humanistic Psychology (1967, editor) — expanded and revised as The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology (2001)
The Search for Existential Identity: Patient, Therapist, and the Process of Psychotherapy (1976)
Psychotherapy and Process: The Fundamentals of an Existential-Humanistic Approach (1978)
The Art of the Psychotherapist (1987)
Intimate Journeys: Stories from Life-Changing Therapy (1990)
Psychotherapy Isn't What You Think: Bringing Psychotherapeutic Practice into Focus (1999)

Impact and Legacy

Bugental's influence runs through the parts of psychotherapy that resist standardisation. His language of presence and of working with resistance is now common property among humanistic, existential and integrative therapists, often used by people who have never read him. He helped build the institutions — Journal of Humanistic Psychology, the Association for Humanistic Psychology, Saybrook — that kept a non-medical, non-behavioural tradition alive inside American psychology through decades when the incentives all pointed the other way. And he trained, by example and in workshops, a generation of clinicians for whom the therapist's own development was part of the method.

The criticisms are the ones his whole tradition faces, and he did not have good answers to most of them.

The evidence base is thin. Bugental's claims rest on case material. There are no controlled trials of existential-humanistic therapy that isolate what he thought mattered, and the central construct — presence — has resisted operationalisation. Terms like authenticity, actualisation and presence are capacious enough that two therapists can mean incompatible things by them, which makes the approach nearly impossible to test and easy to imitate badly.

The movement he founded did not win the argument it picked. Humanistic psychology became a substantial presence in counselling, education and popular culture and a marginal one in academic psychology departments. Viktor Frankl and Maslow are more cited than studied. The human potential language that grew around the movement produced the self-esteem culture of the 1980s, and empirical work on self-esteem has not supported the claims that culture rested on — a development Bugental himself viewed with considerable unease.

The anthropology is contestable. The postulate that a person has a true self to become, and that health consists in becoming it, strikes critics as a distinctly Western, individualistic and middle-class picture of what a life is for — one that under-weights the way selves are constituted by relationships, obligations and material circumstances. Social psychology's situationist findings make the strong version of this claim hard to sustain, even if the clinical observation that people live inauthentically is obviously true.

The method is hard to transmit. A technique can be manualised; a discipline of presence cannot. Bugental's own writing is the best argument both for and against his approach: it is unusually concrete for existential writing, and it still leaves a student largely dependent on finding a teacher. His most honest concession on this point is in the title of his last book — psychotherapy isn't what you think, and saying what it is turns out to require a demonstration rather than an explanation.

Learn More

Rollo May — his collaborator, who brought European existentialism to American psychotherapy
Abraham Maslow — co-founder of the movement Bugental gave a clinical method
Carl Rogers — the other principal strand of humanistic therapy
Viktor Frankl — logotherapy, the third existential tradition of the period
Humanistic Psychology — the "third force" he helped organise