Humanistic Psychology

12 Key excerpts on "Humanistic Psychology"

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  eBook - PDF

  Handbook on Teaching Educational Psychology

  • Donald J. Treffinger, J. Kent Davis, Richard E. Ripple, Donald J. Treffinger, J. Kent Davis, Richard E. Ripple(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  I think another way of saying this is that Humanistic Psychology considers people in terms of what it means to feel and live and think and behave as human beings. It lends itself easily and readily to general discussions or probing analyses of personal ideals, of fulfillment, of self-actualization, and of authenticity and what it means to be real. Child (1973) suggests that perhaps the most persuasive virtue of Humanistic Psychology is the intuitive Tightness of the model. By this he does not mean absolute correctness, but rather that the humanistic model is one that agrees with most people's intuitive impression of what it is like to be a human being, and that this agreement is one important item of positive evidence for the scientific value of the model [p. 18]. Your experience may have shown you, as mine has, that when people seek self-understanding or insight into their feeling worlds or search for solutions to emotional hauntings, they usually do not choose books that explain behavior only in terms of stimulus conditions and response possibilities. Rather, what 148 Don E. Hamachek they do is to choose books and articles that allow them to explore the inner person, the hidden self in more personal, affective ways. Humanistic Psychology encourages this latter kind of learning, which is why, I suspect, it has a strong natural appeal to many. Another strength of the humanistic position is that it offers a flexible framework within which to observe and study behavior. It is an open rather than a closed system. Humanistic Psychology used properly is not a psychology that says feelings are more important than thinking or personal perceptions are more crucial than observable behavior. It is, or at least should be, a psychology which considers the total person in a total environment of interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal feelings.

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  Hergenhahn's An Introduction to the History of Psychology

  • Tracy Henley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. H U M A N I S T I C ( T H I R D -F O R C E ) P S Y C H O L O G Y 549 a small fraction of the people who call themselves “humanistic psychologists.” (pp. 739, 743) As William James said, if existing methods are ineffective for studying certain aspects of human nature, it is not those aspects of human nature that are to be discarded but the methods. To be fair, humanistic psychologists do not want to discard sci-entific inquiry; they want to expand our conception of what a human science should be. Indeed, the expansion of psychology’s domain is arguably Humanistic Psychology’s major contribu-tion to the discipline. In psychology, there is now an increased tendency to study the whole person. We are concerned with not only how people learn, think, and mature biologically and intellectu-ally but also how people formulate plans to attain future goals and why people laugh, cry, and cre-ate meaning in their lives. In the opinion of many, the humanistic paradigm has breathed new life into psychology. Recently, a field called positive psychology has developed that, like traditional Humanistic Psychology, explores positive human attributes. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) describe what positive psychology has in common with traditional Humanistic Psychology and what makes it different: [The purpose of positive psychology] is to remind our field that psychology is not just the study of pathology, weak-ness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best. Psychology is not just a branch of medicine concerned with illness or health; it is much larger.

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  Psychology

  Six Perspectives

  • Dodge Fernald(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Humanistic Psychology did not displace psychoanalysis, which still has wide appeal in the public domain and stimulates research in child develop-ment and unconscious cognitive processes. With its fewer empirical findings, it did not displace behaviorism, which continues today with specialized research and specific applications in everyday life. Instead, Humanistic Psychology has existed on the periphery of academic psychology, flourishing Humanistic Psychology —— 179 with the many practical applications of its approach to therapy while at the same time retaining its comparatively loose structure. Less directly, the humanistic movement resisted the premises in biological psychology, which reduced explanations of psychological phenomena to physio-logical processes. When searching outside its borders, Humanistic Psychology looks instead to philosophical and related literatures, which examine human experience in broader terms. To investigate the topics of personal growth, feelings, and meanings in life, humanistic psychologists sometimes turn to phenomenology , studying nature according to how things seem to the observer, rather than what they may be objectively. The intention is to suspend all everyday interpretations and explanations insofar as possible, concentrating more on the mental experience and less on the observed object or event. Perceiving a flower, phe-nomenological observers, in their imaginations, may vary different charac-teristics of the flower and even different ways of visually apprehending it, striving to experience the essence of the flower or the essence of seeing the flower. More philosophical than psychological, phenomenology aims to ignore the antecedents and consequences surrounding sensation and percep-tion. Instead, the elusive goal becomes a direct investigation of conscious-ness, free of preconceived notions.

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  Theoretical Approaches in Psychology

  • Matt Jarvis(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)
• Humanistic Psychology has given us a simple, accessible and effective model of counselling. This has meant that many more people have access to psychological help than would probably be the case otherwise.
• Perhaps most importantly, Humanistic Psychology is alone in the major psychological approaches in emphasising the positive aspects of human nature and adopting a thoroughly positive attitude to humanity.
Despite these contributions, it is almost certain that Humanistic Psychology will remain a subversive element in psychology rather than part of mainstream psychology. Some of the major limitations of a humanistic approach are as follows:
• To an even greater extent than the psychodynamic approach, Humanistic Psychology has generated theories and ideas that have proved very difficult to test by scientific investigation.
• Because the subject matter of Humanistic Psychology is the experience of the individual person, there is a logical problem of applying theories generated from one individual to another. We cannot for example assume that two people experience the same thing when they speak of a peak or spiritual experience.
• Many humanistic ideas (particularly those around the development of the self) are extremely culture bound, and cannot easily be applied to a range of societies or historical periods.
• The humanistic emphasis on the individual person means that the importance of external influences on people’s lives have probably been underestimated. As Lerman (1992) has pointed out, a battered wife can learn through Humanistic Psychology that she has a right not to be abused, but it does not in itself allow her to leave the situation safely.

Summary

Humanistic Psychology emerged through the work of Rogers and Maslow, who sought to create a third force in psychology to escape the restrictions of behavioural and psychodynamic psychology. They proposed a simple and optimistic psychology with a minimum of theory that would address what people described as important experiences. The major application of Humanistic Psychology is in counselling, where the experience of the individual is of paramount importance. Although the humanistic perspective remains important, it has limited influence in psychological research because of its untestable ideas and emphasis on the experiences of the individual.