Tom Greening: Psychologist,Poet,and Peacemaker

Abstract

In honor of Tom Greening, who recently passed from this world, this reflection explores Greening’s poetry and activism for peace in light of his theory of existential psychology. Greening faithfully served as an Editor of Journal of Humanistic Psychology for many years, but perhaps his most public face was the poems he often shared on the Society for Humanistic Psychology’s email listserv, many of which were also published. His often humorous, irreverent, and ironic poetry is interpreted as a means by which Greening navigated the existential dilemmas that he held to be intrinsic to human existence. Greening’s use of poetry to escape the either/or dichotomies of literal prose and the logic of the excluded middle allowed him, also, to embrace nonviolence as an authentic confrontation with the paradoxes of human existence, including strength in weakness, affirmation of life in the face of death, finding meaning in response to life’s absurdities, discovering freedom within life’s determinisms, and seeking hope for community despite one’s existential aloneness.

I first encountered Tom Greening, as I imagined so did many others, through his poetry. When I was an early career psychologist, I became active in Division 32, the Society for Humanistic Psychology. At that time, before there were annual conferences, members of the Society kept in touch between American Psychological Association (APA) conventions through lively and often intense discussions and debates on the Society’s email list-serv. Tom was a dependable, almost omnipresent persona on the list-serv, but he rarely if ever wrote his responses in prose. His replies almost invariably came in the form of poetry. When a debate or disagreement intensified, one could count on a poem from Tom that would pronounce a verdict on the whole affair. When one of his poems landed in my inbox, it was as if the gods has spoken through the lyrical voice of Division 32’s poet laureate.

Tom’s poems have a distinctive style. They often came in the form of several stanzas of rhyming couplets. They were always marked by a dry, self-deprecating wit dripping with irony. His irreverent sense of humor had a way of cutting through the pretense and posturing that one often finds in academic forums. They frequently me laugh out loud, literally. They often poked fun at some of the figures of who were otherwise revered through saint-like hagiography in the humanistic and existential literature. For example, his poem “Sartre? Not Smart” opens with the stanza: “Nausea suffered by poor Sartre/ plus his existential heart/ caused Jean Paul to die too soon/ crooning a dyspeptic tune” (Greening, 2011, p. 64). As a counterpoint to Sartre’s nausea, Greening calls for “gay frivolity” that throws some meaning in the face of the “grim fool,” Sartre.

Upon closer inspection, Greening’s poetry follows after one of his mentors, Rollo May. The poems are always focused on the paradoxical and the human tendency to over-simply existence by taking up one extreme end of an existential challenge rather than holding the tension between a dilemma’s thesis and antithesis. If Sartre stresses nausea in response to the absurdity of existence, Greening counters with a call to joy in the midst of the world’s fecundity of significance.

The key to Greening’s poetry is perhaps found in his existential approach to psychology. Tom had identified four existential paradoxes or dilemmas that challenge human beings. We are called to affirm life in the face of death, to embrace meaning in a world that often appears absurd, to discover freedom within determinism, and to embrace community while recognizing our existential aloneness (Greening, 1992). For Greening, there are several ways that we can go wrong when wrestling with these existential dilemmas. We can place too much emphasis on either the positive or negative poles of the paradox. For example, Tom was critical of positive psychology’s tendency to amplify the affirmation of life, meaning, freedom, and community without authentically confronting the corresponding antinomies of death, absurdity, determinism, and existential aloneness (Bohart & Greening, 2001). And as noted above, Sartre was equally castigated with over-emphasizing the negative pole of the dilemma of meaning versus absurdity. Greening was also suspicious of those who believed they’d somehow defeated and triumphed over the paradoxes of existence. Finally, another temptation he observed was the tendency to surrender to fatalism when burdened by these existential challenges. All of these solutions, for Greening, amounted to variations of bad faith, a flight from the complexity of existence.

What then, for Greening, was a way forward as we are presented with these existential challenges? The answer, in a word, is creativity. Face the dilemmas of life head on and transcend them through creativity. For Greening, poetry seemed to serve precisely this function. By eskewing the linearity and literality of prose, Tom turned to poetry as a means to express what may have been otherwise inexpressible. The logic of prose tends to be pressured by the law of the excluded middle, and forces discourse into either/or, true/false antinomies. Poetry, by contrast, gives license to the lyricist to find a way to say the impossible by transcending the law of the excluded middle through an embrace of paradox. What in the intrinsic logic of literal speech affords an either/or dilemma becomes, through figural speech in poetry, a resounding both/and. Thus, in his poem Tuft of Flowers, Robert Frost (1913) can say, “‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart/‘whether they work together or apart.’” By adopting paradox as a figure of speech, Frost is able to express in the most pithy way, a pathway forward between the antinomy of community and existential aloneness.

Although I got to know Tom’s poetry through the Division 32 list-serv and his existential theory through his writings, I was also fortunate to become familiar with Tom over the years at board meetings, conferences, and conventions. In our conversations, I came to understand that what Tom was most proud of in his life’s work was his efforts at peacemaking. In the 1980s, inspired by the community work of Carl Rogers and other humanistic psychologists, Greening took a leading role in efforts to build a bridge between citizens of the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Greening’s work was highlighted at the 1984 APA Convention with a panel organized by the American Humanistic Psychological Association’s Francis May and a member of APA’s Committee on International Relations, Steven Kennedy (Greening, 1989). Tom recounted the joint efforts of “Passion Bearers” who engaged in international dialogue in an effort to transcend the “antagonisms and ideological addiction” between the United States and Soviet Union, and he called for psychology of passion that could “actualize the human potential for peace” (Greening, 1986, p. 98). He was able to use his role as editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology to publish the papers presented on the panel, and as a result, call attention to these efforts in a national academic journal of psychology.

Greening’s work for peace also found expression in his poetry. In his poem, titled “Refugee,” for example, he adopts the voice of a refugee who sacrifices everything rather than conjoin the hostilities of his enemy with the force of arms. “I’ll join the homeless masses,” he writes, “the dispossessed, and/ I’ll be free, while you/ are chained to your AK-47.” Here, again, we witness Tom’s embrace of paradox: To lose is to gain, to be deemed a coward is to become the true hero, and to be forced from one’s land is to become free. “I know nothing,” the poem concludes, “only that no cubic foot of land is worth/ one slaughtered child” (Greening, 2003, p. 18).

Through Greening’s poetry and activism, one can see the ends of his existential theory. The paradoxes of existence are not merely a philosophical exercise, or a flexing of intellectual muscle, but rather oriented toward fundamentally ethical and, namely, nonviolent aims. Greening takes up Martin Luther King’s (1968) call for an answer to violence and war with “creative maladjustment”—namely, a refusal to adjust one’s self to the evils of militarism, racism or poverty. Creative maladjustment is a concept that in itself represents a paradox, an ironic twist, which concretely illustrates the capacity of creativity for transcendence of the human dilemma. The way of peacemaking and nonviolence requires a capacity to recognize strength in weakness, and in terms of Greening’s existential theory, the affirmation of life in the face of almost certain death, the embrace of meaning in response to the absurdity of war and violence, the discovery of freedom in the very moment one’s fate is determined by the force of one’s enemy, and, in standing alone with courage against the tide of war, one adopts, in that very sense of isolation, a commitment to the possibility for genuine community. Tom Greening has died, but in his death, his life takes on all the more significance for it. In honor of Tom, let us embrace the paradox.