Criticism
Over the years, Esalen Institute has been the subject of criticism. Generally, the Human Potential Movement has been criticized for espousing an ethic that the inner-self should be freely expressed in order to reach one's true potential. Some people have seen this ethic as an aspect of Esalen's culture. The historian Christopher Lasch claimed that humanistic techniques encourage narcissistic, spiritual materialistic or self-obsessive thoughts and behaviors. These criticisms were examined in a 2002 BBC television series, called The Century of the Self, which included video segments recorded at Esalen. In 1990 a graffiti artist spray painted, "Jive shit for rich white folk," on the entrance to Esalen, highlighting class and race issues. This implied that Esalen courses are too expensive and poor people can't afford to experience their "full human potential". Some think that this is a regression of progress away from true spiritual growth.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)