What is humanistic psychology? |

Introduction

Humanism became influential in psychology through a loosely knit movement that began in the 1950s and became a significant force in the 1960s. Known as humanistic psychology, it is not a single branch of psychology, focused on a particular content area, but a unique approach to all of psychology’s content areas. Because humanistic psychology was not created around the work of one founder, it has avoided becoming dogmatic, but it suffers the corresponding disadvantage of having no unanimously inclusive doctrines. Nevertheless, humanistic psychology does offer a distinctive approach to psychological life, based on respect for the specifically “human” quality of human existence. In humanistic psychology, an existence is one’s irreducible being in a world that is carved out by one’s personal involvements. Fidelity to the full meaning of being human requires understanding human psychological life on its own terms, as it actually presents itself, rather than on models borrowed from other fields of inquiry. In contrast, traditional psychology assembled its foundational concept about human existence during the nineteenth century from such disciplines as physiology, biology, chemistry, and physics. These natural sciences share a common assumption about their subject matter—namely, that it is “matter,” objective things that are completely determined by the causal impacts of other things in mechanical and lawful ways that can be explained, measured, predicted, and controlled.

Central Tenets

Humanistic psychology arose to counter the prevailing scientifically oriented beliefs within the field of psychology during the mid-twentieth century. It argues that the natural science model distorts, trivializes, and mostly neglects the real subject matter: human existence. When love is reduced to a biological drive and insight to a conditioned response, humanistic psychologists protest, psychology has lost contact with the real humanness of its subject matter. Their alternative approach includes four essential features.

First, integral to humanistic psychology is its appreciation of the person as a whole. Such a holistic emphasis holds that people cannot be reduced to parts (labeled processes, instincts, drives, conditioned responses), since the meaning of any part can only be understood in relation to the whole person. For example, a humanistic psychology of thinking also takes into account the thinker’s feelings and motives, since it is the person as a whole who thinks, not only the brain or an information-processing system. Even the most seemingly isolated physiological events cannot be fully comprehended apart from the person’s total existence. A study of women recently widowed, for example, showed that their bodies’ immune systems weakened in the year after their husbands’ deaths. This subtle yet profound way of embodying grief is best understood when the human body is grasped as a “bodying forth” of a whole existence and personal history.

A second essential feature of humanistic psychology concerns its notion of consciousness, which is informed by the phenomenological concept of intentionality. Consciousness is seen as “intending” an object, meaning not the everyday sense of intending as a deliberate choice but rather that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Whereas traditional psychologies conceive of consciousness as a machine, a brain, or a container, or dismiss it altogether, the concept of intentionality means that consciousness is fundamentally relational: It is an encountering and dwelling in one’s world. For example, to be conscious of the room means to be intertwined with it. To be immersed in a memory means to be there, in that remembered scene. This communion is reciprocal in the sense that the objects of consciousness are also implicated in this relation. It is neither objective stimulation nor variables that ordinary consciousness intends but a meaningful world, intended through one’s own way of being with it. For example, a student driver is conscious of other cars as looming too close, whereas the consciousness of the race car driver intends the spaces through which he or she could drive the car.

Third, this notion of consciousness leads to humanistic psychology’s recognition of the irreducible reality of the person’s own experience as the core of his or her psychological life. Rather than preconceiving a person’s behavior from an outside point of view, humanistic psychology seeks to clarify its significance by understanding the behaving person’s own viewpoint. In other words, behavior is seen as an expression of a person’s involvement in a situation. For example, a man walking across a snow-covered frozen lake could not be said to be brave (or foolhardy) if he experienced it as a field instead.

A fourth essential constituent is a vision of human freedom. For humanistic psychology, a person unfolds his or her existence over time by responsibly owning and becoming who he or she is. This does not mean that the self is whatever a person wants to be. On the contrary, one’s own choice is to be the self that one authentically is. This choice, because one is free to make it or not, is also the source of anxiety, as people confront their own ultimate responsibility for what they will make of their lives. Terms such as “self-actualization” and “self-realization” depict this most crucial obligation of being human. Selfhood, in other words, is not simply what one has been given by environmental or genetic sources. It is, rather, a possibility to be owned and lived by transcending the given. Instead of determining the course of psychological life, the givens of one’s existence must be freely engaged in the process of one’s own authentic self-becoming.

Contributions to Psychology

Within psychology, the humanistic approach’s most important applications have been in the areas of psychotherapy, personality theory, and research methods. Rollo May aptly described the humanistic idea of psychotherapy as helping patients experience their existence as real. Carl R. Rogers’s person-centered therapy depicts the humanistic purpose: to assist clients in unblocking and experiencing their own self-actualizing tendencies. This is accomplished by nonjudgmentally clarifying and mirroring back to clients their own spontaneous expressions of self with genuine empathy and unconditional positive regard.

A second area of major application has been personality theory. Among the many who have contributed in this regard are Gordon Allport, Henry A. Murray, Charlotte Buhler, and James Bugental. The most famous are Rogers, May, and Abraham Maslow. They see personality as a tendency of self-actualizing: of “becoming” (May), of realizing one’s possibilities for “full humanness” (Maslow), of being “fully functioning” (Rogers). They emphasize that the personality is oriented toward growth, thus dynamic rather than static, yet recognize that this process is unfinished and far from automatic. Rogers noted that “incongruence” between one’s self-concept and one’s actual self blocks actualizing tendencies. If a person experiences positive regard from significant others, such as parents, as being conditional (for example, “I love you because you never get angry” or “I’ll love you if you always agree with me”), the effort to meet these conditions results in an “incongruence” between one’s self-concept and the self one actually is being.

May stressed that to become self-actualized, one must be aware of oneself. Facing one’s own being requires risk and commitment, based on one’s capacities for love and will, courage and care. This “central distinguishing characteristic,” the human capacity for self-awareness, can be blocked. People may evade the insecurity of this risk by not facing themselves, but the resulting deadening leads to boredom and a trivialization of life.

Maslow specified his conception of self-actualization in the context of his theory of motivation. He described a hierarchy of needs, extending from “deficiency needs” (physiological needs and safety) to “being needs” (belonging, love, self-esteem, and self-actualization). He considered growth motivation an inherent tendency of people to fulfill ever higher motives on this hierarchy.

A third application of the humanistic approach has been innovative methods for psychological research. These methods, known as human science, can be used to study human experience as it is actually lived in the world. Human science research is phenomenologically based, and it uses data gathered by interviews and written descriptions, which are then analyzed qualitatively. The aim is not to reduce experience to the traditional operationally defined variables, but to understand the essential structure of the person’s actually lived experience. A leading figure in these innovations has been Amedeo Giorgi at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Contributions to Other Fields

Humanistic innovations have been widely applied beyond psychology, in such areas as medicine, politics, feminism, law, religion, social action, international relations, and ecology. For example, former United States president Jimmy Carter used Rogers’s techniques (in consultation with Rogers) during the successful Camp David peace talks he facilitated between Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel. The three areas in which humanistic psychology has had the widest impact are business management, education, and personal growth. In each, humanistic innovations derive from the basic point that the fully functioning person is one whose striving for self-actualization is unblocked.

Within management, humanistic psychology was an early contributor to the emerging field of organizational development. Rogers’s person-centered approach was a key influence on the development of the human relations training for business managers conducted by the National Training Laboratory. In Eupsychian Management: A Journal (1965), Maslow provided a humanistic theory of management. He proposed that employees could be most productive if, through more democratic boss-worker relationships, they were given the opportunity to grow in terms of self-actualization and reach their highest human potential. (This book was translated into Japanese and was influential in the development of the managerial style that became characteristic of Japanese business.) Maslow’s motivation hierarchy also was the basis for Douglas McGregor’s well-known contrast between "theory X" and "theory Y" (the former a traditional authoritarian managerial approach, the latter a humanistic one proposing a more participative managerial style).

As humanistic psychology became more prevalent, it also had an impact on the adjoining field of education. Both Rogers and Maslow were severe critics of the prevailing system of education, in which education had been reduced to the acquisition of skills, as if it were merely technical training. Disgusted by the extrinsic focus of education, they promoted the view that educators needed to foster students’ intrinsic or natural sense of wonder, creativity, capacity for self-understanding, and growth toward their own self-actualization. Rogers’s Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become (1969) became an influential summary of those views.

Beyond the professional fields of business and education, humanistic psychology affected the larger society most directly through spawning the human potential movement. In many “growth centers” (Esalen, in California, being the most prominent), a wide assortment of services are offered. They include such techniques as sensitivity training, encounter groups, sensory awareness, and meditation. The length of time involved varies but is usually of a short duration, such as a weekend or a week. The aim is not treatment for psychologically disturbed persons but a means of facilitating personal growth.

Roots and Evolution

Humanistic psychology’s roots include European psychology and philosophy. Among its psychological predecessors are Kurt Goldstein’s organismic theory, Karen Horney’s self theory, and Erich Fromm’s social analyses. Its philosophical heritage includes existentialism and phenomenology. Fearing the eclipse of the human in a world dominated by science, existentialism began with the recognition that “i]t is important . . . to hold fast to what it means to be a human being,” as originally stated by Søren Kierkegaard in 1846. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl, phenomenology’s founder, articulated the key notion of the intentionality of consciousness. Husserl also fashioned a distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences (made earlier by Wilhelm Dilthey) into a powerful critique of psychology’s traditional scientific foundations. Later philosophers, particularly Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, joined existentialism and phenomenology into a compelling philosophy of existence.

Existential phenomenology first affected the work of European psychologists, especially R. D. Laing, Jan Hendrik van den Berg, Viktor Frankl, Erwin Straus, Ludwig Binswanger, and Medard Boss. In the United States, May was influential in importing these European currents through his edited book of translated readings, Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958). In 1959, Duquesne University established a pioneering graduate program devoted to existential phenomenological psychology. In the 1960s, graduate programs in humanistic psychology were established at Sonoma State University and Saybrook Institute in California and at West Georgia College.

Much of the movement’s early organizational work was done by Maslow, who, with Tony Sutich, launched the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1961. In 1963, Maslow, Sutich, and Bugental inaugurated the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Within psychology’s main organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), the Division of Humanistic Psychology was established in 1971 in response to a petition by its members. It began a journal, The Humanistic Psychologist.

Emergence of Cognitive Psychology

With the rapid pace of such developments, by the end of the 1960s humanistic psychologists saw themselves as a “third force”: an alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalysis, the two dominant traditions in American psychology at that time. A naïve optimism characterized their sense of the future; humanistic psychology has not succeeded in supplanting those traditions. What happened instead was the rise of cognitive psychology as the main challenger for dominance. Like humanistic psychology, the cognitive approach was formed during the 1950s to dispute traditional psychology’s narrow focus on behavior as an objective, observable event, but it offered a more conventional alternative. While returning to the mind as a topic of psychology, it did so while retaining the traditional mechanistic view of mental life. In comparison, humanistic psychology’s more fundamental proposal that psychology set aside its mechanistic assumption’s altogether continues to cast it in the role of a less palatable alternative for most psychologists.

In other ways, however, the humanistic approach has been a victim of its own successes beyond psychology. Its applications to psychotherapy, management, and education are now so commonly known that they are scarcely recognized anymore as “humanistic.” It appears that, for now at least, humanistic psychology has found greater integration beyond psychology than within it.

Bibliography

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