HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
Broadly conceived Humanistic psychology is a movement within psychology that in its theorizing and research emphasizes what it perceives to be the distinctly human characteristics of humanity.
Though not devoid of a number of articulate theories or a respectable body of knowledge, humanistic psychology is characterized less by its theoretical stance or research orientation than by its attitude toward human beings. Its emphasis is on spontaneity, internal locus of control, uniqueness, wholeness, personality, and capacity for self-actualization. Thus it seeks to humanize what is a predominantly mechanomorphic psychology and to replace it with a psychology based on a concept of persons as creative, self-transcending beings, controlled not by outside or unconscious forces but by their own values and choices alone.
The movement counts a large number of prominent psychologists as its adherents. Among them are Buhler, Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Victor Frankl, Henry A. Murray, Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow. These by no means agree with each other on every point. In the broadest sense humanistic psychology includes theorists and practitioners who operate from a phenomenological and existentialistic tradition as well as those who work from a predominantly holistic, pragmatistic, and Darwinian tradition. What unites all of these into one movement is their opposition to a mechanistic, deterministic view of humanity, positivism in philosophy, and behaviorism in psychology.
In the literature phenomenology and existentialism are frequently described separately as systems of philosophy and psychology, next to humanistic psychology. Thus it is perhaps more accurate to characterize humanistic psychology in the broadest sense as a humanistic movement in psychology and philosophy. This allows us to reserve the name humanistic psychology in the strictest sense for that branch of psychology proper of which Maslow and Rogers are the chief proponents.
History and Development.
Humanistic psychology has had great impact on psychology as a whole. It is an American product that has incorporated many of the typically European phenomenological and existentialistic themes. But in doing so it has nevertheless remained firmly rooted in the American individualistic and evolutionistic tradition.
The origin of humanistic psychology as a school dates back to 1954, when Maslow described its adherents as “people who are interested in the scientific study of creativity, love, higher values, autonomy, growth, self-actualization, need gratification, etc.” (Misiak, 1973, p. 127). In subsequent years there followed a series of publications by various authors, each taking humanistic psychology as a point of departure. In 1961 the Journal of Humanistic Psychology was founded by Anthony Sutich. One year later the American Association for Humanistic Psychology was established. In 1970 the American Psychology Association approved the establishment of a Division of Humanistic Psychology (Division 32). During that same year the First International Conference on Humanistic Psychology was held in Amsterdam, with Buhler as its president, and from then on the movement was off and running.
The movement has generated a veritable troupe of second-generation adherents, all of them busily applying humanistic psychology principles in therapy, education, family life, business, interpersonal, and international relations. Through the use of encounter groups the movement currently offers a smorgasbord of growth-enhancing workshops that is so diverse that it makes one wonder whether anything short of behaviorism cannot be included under its banner. The ability to incorporate whatever is new and creative is one of the hallmarks of this school of psychology.
Philosophical Roots.
Humanistic psychology has several philosophical roots. This accounts to a large degree for the inner tensions that the movement is experiencing.
Phenomenological-Existentialistic Tradition.
The first root lies in what may loosely be called the phenomenological-existentialistic tradition. Its history goes back to Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who is the acknowledged father of both Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology and Stumpf’s empirical phenomenology.
Brentano’s chief contribution was his notion of intentionality. This notion implies that consciousness is not a matter of contents impressed upon our minds by an external reality but it can be understood only with reference to the subjective activity of human intentions. Conscious content is what human subjects intend there to be. At the same time intentionality also implies that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Intentionality is always directed toward and stands in relation to some intended object. When he or she forms, intends, or intuits the object, the human subject must therefore always be guided by the nature or the essence of the object.
This makes the intended object simultaneously the product of the intentional act of the human subject and the object toward which that act is directed. From that intentional vantage point investigation can go one of two ways. It can go in the direction of Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology, which investigates the intentional act of the human subject that constitutes consciousness. It can also go in the direction of Stumpf’s empirical phenomenology, which investigates the relation of human intentionality to the intended object. In either case, however, phenomenology consists of the investigation of psychic acts rather than psychic contents.
Via Stumpf’s empirical phenomenology Brentano became the grandfather of Gestalt psychology in general and of Kurt Lewin’s field theory in particular. His influence is evident in the Gestalt notion of perception. It manifests the ambivalence of phenomenology in that perceiving is clearly viewed as a constructive act but nonetheless an act that is governed by the laws of perception inherent in the perceptual object or percept. Similarly, the self in Lewin’s field theory functions as the subject pole of every perceptual act that constitutes the phenomenal field. But also as perceived object in the phenomenal field it regulates if not determines the nature of the perceptual acts of the self as subject.
Humanistic psychology borrows from Brentano and Husserl the notion that the human subject (i.e., the organism) is active in the sense that it organizes the world that surrounds it. The organism responds only to an environment that it itself has perceived (Rogers, 1961). But the human subject also finds its organizing purpose or direction in the phenomenal field. It incites the organism to perform its perceptual activity. Experience (here understood as experiential field) has meaning, and the organism must let experience tell it its own meaning (Rogers, 1961). The organism must be open to and receptive of the phenomenal field. More than that, it must seek to enhance the phenomenal field, particularly that part of it that constitutes the self.
Thus a number of the basic notions of humanistic psychology such as the self, experience, perception, the phenomenal field—all of which it views as distinctly human characteristics—are directly derived from the phenomenological-existentialistic tradition.
Pragmatism.
But humanistic psychology is also rooted in the pragmatism of William James and even more firmly in that of John Dewey. Dewey’s main importance for humanistic psychology was that he served as the conduit for the influence of Darwinism on the movement. Darwinian thought held that reality is dynamic, that living things develop in adaptive interaction with their environment.
Following Darwin, Dewey too saw change rather than stasis as the primary characteristic of reality. This dynamic notion allowed him to conceive of the order of the different kingdoms in reality (i.e., rocks, plants, and animals) as one of different levels of interactive complexity For Dewey reality originally consisted of an infinite number of interactions. Things emerged or came into being when series of these interactions grouped themselves into organized wholes. When these wholes began to interact with other wholes, they made it possible for even more complex wholes to emerge.
For Dewey this ongoing process is characteristic of all that exists in nature. No organized interactive whole or thing is ever complete in itself. Its meaning lies perpetually in the consequences it engenders in subsequent, more complex interactive wholes. Things are always in the process of becoming integrated into more complex things. Reality is thus perpetually (re)ordered or (re)constructed in a process that runs from lower to higher differentiation and integration. This dynamic order of on-going, naturally occurring differentiation and integration is what Dewey called growth.
Humanistic psychology owes a great deal to Dewey’s pragmatism and, via Dewey, to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Notions such as becoming, growth, actualization, organism, and the hierarchical structure of human activity are all derived from this philosophical root.
However, on one significant point humanistic psychology parts company with Dewey. This concerns the formative influence of human subjects on the process of growth. Dewey held that on the human level of interaction the innovative activity of the human subject can shape the process of growth and redirect it to its own human ends. Thus at that level of interaction the naturally occurring growth process becomes a historically formative process, governed by changes that have their purpose in a source outside the growth process itself. Simply put, Dewey held that people can form growth.
While humanistic psychology certainly recognizes the existence of subjects, it denies that they exist external to the process of growth, and thus it also denies that subjects can form growth to their own human ends. On the contrary the growth process itself has formative power, and it naturally shapes the human subject rather than the reverse.
Humanistic psychology holds that everything that exists, including human beings, is taken up in this total evolutionary process of becoming. This becoming or growth process has its own ends in view and its own organizational principle within itself. It has morphological properties. It forms itself dynamically. Individuals, as microcosms of this total process, each uniquely have the capacity to form themselves or to actualize their potentials. But they have this capacity only insofar as they are open to and receptive of this evolutionary process of becoming, thus only insofar as they function as the organisms that they are.
This morphological principle hails back to Aristotle’s doctrine of entelechy. He defined it as the impulse of an organized body or organism to become what it is. Driesch defended this principle as late as the beginning of the twentieth century against the predominantly mechanistic view of mainstream biology
The problem with the entelechy doctrine is that it implies a teleology, that is, it implies that the growth process is directed by goals. And once these goals are fulfilled, they can conceivably stop the growth process, thus endangering its status as a total, perpetually ongoing process of becoming. To avoid such negative consequences humanistic psychology rejected the notion of entelechy and opted for the notion of directionality.
This notion, originating with Kurt Goldstein, is derived from a biological version of holism developed by the South African philosopher-biologist Jan Smuts. Andras Angyal, following Smuts, has suggested that the goal does not “define the direction of an activity, but rather the intrinsic pattern of a direction of behavior determines what object is a suitable goal” (Angyal, 1958, pp. 53—55). This notion of directionality safeguards the dynamic self-motivation and self-direction of the growth process at every level of differentiation and integration.
Essential Characteristics.
Humanistic psychology is often called the third force in psychology because it pits itself against the deterministic picture of persons evident in both psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Thus it presents itself as an alternative to both these systems of psychology. It rejects the pessimistic view of psychoanalysis, which holds that one’s actions are wholly driven by the libidinal energy of an unconscious, irrational id. It also rejects the behavioristic view that human behavior is wholly determined by environmental forces. Thus it rejects the internal determinism of psychoanalysis as well as the external determinism of behaviorism because both reduce persons to something lower than human.
Over against the position of traditional psychology that people are nothing but animals or machines it posits the view that people are human. Over against the view that behavior is nothing but a response to a stimulus it states that human behavior is purposive. Over against the view that culture is nothing but a sublimated, covert attempt at gratifying dark sexual urges it emphasizes the view that culture is the expression of humanity’s higher aspirations. Over against the elementarism of Wilhelm Wundt and John B. Watson alike it argues that a person is a totality. Over against the determinism of mainline psychology it stresses human freedom, creativity, spontaneity and playfulness. Over against a preoccupation with needs and drives that drag people down to the level of animals it talks about goals that draw people up to the height of the gods. Over against mechanism, which depicts human behavior as randomly governed by perilous chance, it steadfastly maintains the orderly, organized character of human acts. Over against a depth psychology it proposes a psychology of heights. In short, it states that human beings are always more than the reduced picture that traditional psychology has given of them.
Humanistic psychology is a “more than” psychology; more than is its basic paradigm. Traditional psychologies are viewed as all being reductionisms. But humanistic psychology with its emphasis on all things human is a thoroughgoing, dynamic transcendentalism in which one’s reach must exceed one’s grasp. It is a celebration of human potentiality and possibility. Its motto is semper excelsior and its key is transcendence. Moreover, to guarantee the perpetuity of this process of transcendence or growth and to avoid the stultifying effects of finalism it stresses that the direction of the process is primary and its goals secondary.
Basic Themes and Their Implications.
Growth.
Humanistic psychology is primarily a growth psychology as opposed to a depth psychology or a stimulus-response psychology. This emphasis on growth and actualization represents its first and major theme. It characterizes its view of human reality as dynamic, with its constant emphasis on novelty. The picture of people in humanistic psychology is that of homo novus.
Personhood.
A second theme stresses the importance of such notions as person, autonomy, uniqueness, self, experience, and (inter) subjectivity. This theme states that humans are unique. This not only means that as a species they are distinctly human as opposed to other creatures, but more importantly it means that it is in the nature of people to be unique. Every human being alive is first and foremost universally unique, thus wholly unlike his or her fellows (Rogers, 1961).
Second, it stresses that every human being, without exception, is a person. This means that every person is the initiator, the director, and the evaluator of his or her own development. Personal growth, actualization, and enhancement are not externally controlled but occur internal to the human person. Everyone is in that sense autonomous— that is, a law unto himself or herself.
Third, it stresses that every person is uniquely the subject pole of his or her own experience, perception, awareness, and reality. This means that no one’s experience, perception, or reality is identical to that of any other. A reality that holds for every person does not exist. There are as many realities as there are persons. Quite literally all that exists or occurs in the world exists or occurs within the internal frame of reference of persons.
Fourth, it stresses that people are aware of themselves as persons. This self-awareness makes that part of a person’s experience that constitutes one’s own being (i.e., the self) the most important element in one’s entire experiential field. The self functions as the reference point to which all other parts of the field are centrally and directly related.
Finally, every person meets with others in his or her experience. These others are also unique, thus principally unlike himself or herself. These others are persons who are the master of their own destiny, who have their own experience and their own world. It behooves all of us, therefore, in the spirit of the best of empiricism, not to treat others as extensions of ourselves. Rather than manipulate them or explain them as objects in our experience, we must be open to them, receive them, and understand them as autonomous subjects. The other can never be counted, measured, or manipulated as our object, because he or she is a subject. For this reason there is no such thing as objectivity among people. Human fellowship is always a fellowship of subjects, an inter-subjectivity
Taking these two themes together we can state that each person is a unique principle of self, actualization or self-transcendence. This formulation characterizes humanistic psychology both in its depth and in its breadth. This formulation further implies that the only viable stance anyone can ever take toward one’s fellows is to be receptive and even reverent of their capacity to grow, to transcend themselves. We must always be open to their newness and, what is more, allow ourselves to be changed by their dynamic uniqueness.