Center for Swedenborgian Studies

The Wilson Van Dusen Collection

Black-and-white portrait of Wilson Van Dusen seated in front of bookshelves.
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American psychologist Wilson Van Dusen (1923-2005), born and raised in San Francisco, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and completed his Ph.D. in phenomenological psychology from the University of Ottawa in 1952. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marines in World War II and in the Medical Service Corps. In the postwar era, he held an unlimited master’s license in the merchant marine and spent sixteen years, mostly inactive, as an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve but taught mathematics for sixteen years to the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary. In addition to his three traditional academic degrees, Van Dusen completed certificate programs for metaphysics, divinity, religious humanities, and art.

Van Dusen’s cultural and historical significance can be grouped into three categories: as an innovator for clinical psychology therapeutic practice methods, as a Human Potential Movement author and teacher, and as a widely published and read spirituality and spiritual practice author. Upon completing his doctoral degree, he served as chief psychologist, clinical psychologist, and acting chief of research at Mendocino State Hospital in northern California from 1953 to 1968. During his years of leadership there, the hospital often housed up to 3,000 patients identified as “criminally insane,” severe substance abusers, and general psychiatric patients. During his later years in clinical work, he developed a reputation for success in treating schizophrenic patients without pharmacology. His methodology for this was informed by his discovery of Swedenborg around 1965. He began entering phenomenologically into the mental world of schizophrenic patients and engaged their visions and voices sympathetically. He found that this method often worked, and while still at the hospital he published The Presence of Spirits in Madness: A Confirmation of Swedenborg in Recent Empirical Findings (1968).

During these final years in clinical work, he actively engaged in the evolving new school of the Human Potential Movement (HPM). A new relationship with Carl R. Rogers led to being published in Rogers’s groundbreaking 1967 work, Person to Person: The Problem of Being Human that carries the subtitle, “with Eugene T. Gendlin, John M. Schlien, and Wilson Van Dusen.” Van Dusen’s contribution, “The Natural Depth in Man,” lauds Swedenborg’s transcendental capacities within human personhood. The Natural Depth in Man became the title for his first book, published by Harper and Row (1971), where he continues to develop a framework for spiritual capacities that endow human potentiality and is an early author exploring transpersonal psychology. In addition to his writing during this period, he taught courses at the University of Ottawa, University of California at Davis, and at nearby Sonoma State University where he was instrumental in creating its highly regarded new department program in humanistic psychology, the first in the country. Through his writing and teaching Van Dusen became an important, if minor, figure in the Human Potential Movement.

His engagement with Swedenborg became his central life focus, and he entered a third phase of historic recognition as arguably the most widely read single author in Swedenborgian spirituality for his final thirty years. This began with his second Harper and Row book, The Presence of Other Worlds: The Psycho-Spiritual Findings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1975), the bestselling book on Swedenborg in the twentieth century. He followed this with several more books and dozens of articles published largely in Swedenborgian periodicals and magazines, all of which are in the collection.

The Wilson Van Dusen collection contains approximately two hundred books from his library on spirituality and major faith traditions with annotations in most, as well as eight linear feet of research folders that include notes for publishing efforts arranged by topic, materials relating to his Philemon Foundation, six personal experience journals kept during his years of academic research into psychoactive drugs as well as other journal writing in his spiritual experiences, and correspondence with various interlocutors.