HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

THE move towards cognitive psychology came about through frustrations with what were seen as the limitations of psychoanalysis and behavioural psychology. In the 1950s, another movement within psychology also began to gain ground – one that rejected all the main strands of psychology: psychoanalysis, behavioural psychology, and the emerging cognitive psychology approach. This fourth approach has become known as humanistic psychology.

Rather than seeing the human psyche as a minefield of conflicting parts of the self, driven by primitive urges (as the psychoanalytic approach was characterised), or viewing the self as the result of myriad stimulus-response exchanges that make us who we are (as behaviourists do), or seeing the reasons for our beliefs and actions as residing in our perception and cognition of what’s around us (as the cognitive psychologists are doing), humanist psychologists view the individual as a whole person with their own free will, desires, responsibilities, passions, aims, and aspirations. In short, all the kinds of things that make us human. For the humanists, the concept of mental health for far too long had been obsessed with reducing negative states such as anxiety or depression. The humanists wanted mental health to be all about striving for something better, like happiness or fulfilment.

What do you really want from life?

Two key thinkers are the pioneers of the humanist psychologist movement. One is Abraham Maslow, best known for his 1954 concept of the “hierarchy of needs,” which dates from 1943, and which presents an image of what people really want from life – and the idea for striving for something for its own sake. Having established lower-order needs – such as food, shelter, belonging, self-esteem – we seek knowledge, meaning, and, ultimately, the realisation of our full potential.

The second, Carl Rogers, shared Maslow’s view that humankind seeks this higher state of self-actualisation, making the most of our talents or education or skills. And along with that, we seek positive regard, which can be love, or simply respect, from others. In his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, he discussed some of the conditions necessary to achieve this state – a discussion that was to form the basis of a client-centred therapy (later renamed “person-centred” therapy). At its heart is the concept of unconditional positive regard – the kind of parental love that children can enjoy no matter what they might do, and which gives them a freedom to take risks and discover what they like doing. In cases where children receive only conditional positive regard, parental love may only be won through good behaviour or excellent performance, with the risks of the child becoming a perfectionist or neurotic later in life. Client-centred therapy could redress this by the therapist providing the unconditional positive regard, and allowing the client to start finding their own way toward their self-actualising goals.

The “I” and the “me”

For Rogers, an important theoretical aspect was the self concept. There are two parts to it: the “I” that does stuff, and the “me” that the “I” sometimes thinks about, such as when we say “I am ashamed of myself.” The self concept develops as we grow up, and we are happiest, Rogers believed, when we have congruence between the “I” and the “me” – that is, minimal conflict between the perceived self and the kind of behaviours we actually find ourselves doing.

Rogers developed his “Q Sort” test – a kind of personality test using a deck of flash cards – to measure levels of this congruence, which allowed for some degree of quantitative testing to demonstrate correlation between congruence of the self concept, and other measures of well-being or social adjustment.

Nonetheless, humanistic psychology is often characterised as being more of a qualitative than quantitative strand of psychology. By contrast, positive psychology is a related branch that also has as its goal not simply a reduction of psychological pain, but more positively, the advancement of well-being – looking, for example, at the science of happiness, or how creativity is stimulated: in many respects, another route to the summit of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

. See also Positive Psychology