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.