Humanistic Psychology: History, Theory And Basic Principles
Throughout the History of Psychology, many explanatory models of behavior and the human mind have emerged that, based on different ideas and purposes, try to help us understand more about ourselves. In this sense, humanistic philosophy has been very influential, and has given rise to its own paradigm in the world of Psychology.
As a philosophical current, humanism emphasizes the importance of the subjectivity of each individual and how important it is for each person to construct their own meaning in life. This, of course, is reflected in Humanistic Psychology, which we will learn about throughout this article.
Trying to delve into the different approaches within psychology, Humanistic Psychology It is, in postmodernism, one of the booming currents, and even today it is very influential. Today we discover its history and fundamental aspects.
If you are an observant person, You may have realized that people have a certain tendency to complicate our lives asking ourselves the why of things I am not referring to those aseptic “whys” that doctors, engineers and programmers ask, but to that other version of the question that points towards the total uselessness of their possible responses: “What does this photograph suggest to me?”, “why am I the person I have become?”, “what am I doing walking down the street?”.
These are not questions whose answers are going to get us out of trouble, and yet we spend time and effort trying to answer them: a bad deal from an economic perspective.
Should we understand, therefore, that this tendency towards the useless is an imperfection in our way of thinking? It probably isn’t.
After all, this attachment to the transcendent has been with us since time immemorial and it does not seem to have gone wrong since then. In any case, perhaps We should understand that the existential search is one of those characteristics that define us as human beings Perhaps we should, if we want to better understand the logic by which our thinking is guided, look at the proposals of what we know today as Humanistic Psychology, a psychological current that does not renounce understanding all the aspects of what makes us human.
What is Humanistic Psychology?
We find the first clues when it comes to placing Humanist Psychology on the map of psychological currents in one of its main champions: Abraham Maslow (the creator of what is now known as Maslow’s Pyramid of human needs). in his book The Creative Personality, Maslow speaks of three sciences or large isolated categories from which the human psyche is studied. One of them is the behaviorist and objectivist current, which is based on the positivist paradigm of science and that treats objective behavioral phenomena, without attributing mental causes to them.
Second is what he calls “Freudian psychologies,” which emphasize the role of the subconscious in explaining human behavior and, especially, psychopathology. In addition, Humanistic Psychology is also inspired by the psychoanalytic current when considering the importance of the symbolic in people’s lives, generating concepts capable of capturing the way in which human beings guide their lives.
Finally, Maslow talks about the current to which he subscribes: Humanistic Psychology. This third current, however, has a peculiarity. Humanistic Psychology does not deny the two previous approaches, but rather encompasses them based on another philosophy of science Beyond being a series of methods through which to study and intervene on human beings, it has its reason for being in a way of understanding things, a unique philosophy Specifically, this school is based on two philosophical movements: phenomenology and existentialism.
Phenomenology? Existentialism? What’s that?
It is not easy to describe in a few lines two concepts about which so much has been written. First of all, and simplifying everything a little, the conception of the phenomenology can be addressed by explaining the idea of freak In fact, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger defines it as “that in which something can become evident, visible in itself”. For phenomenology, then, what we perceive as the real is the ultimate reality.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology highlights the fact that we are never able to experience “reality itself” directly (since our senses act as a filter for this information), while the opposite occurs with those subjective aspects of which we are aware. .
That is, it appeals to the intellectual and emotional experience as the legitimate sources of knowledge, a claim that also includes Humanistic Psychology. This means, among other things, that from this paradigm the subjective is not just a by-product of objective and easy-to-measure psychological processes, but an aspect as important as the rest.
Existentialism
For its part, existentialism is a philosophical current that proposes a reflection on human existence itself. Two of his postulates that most influence Humanistic Psychology are the following:
Human existence is reflective thanks to consciousness From consciousness arises the vital anguish of searching for meaning in existence.
The existence of the human being is changing and dynamic by its very nature, that is, it develops Through the development of existence, concretized in its decision-making, we reach the essence, which can be authentic or inauthentic depending on its congruence with the person’s life project.
In short, both phenomenology and existentialism place emphasis on consciousness and the capacity of man to decide, at all times, what to do, ultimately moved by his intentionality and not by his biology or environment, thus distancing himself from the innatism and the environmentalism. Humanistic Psychology collects this heritage and guides it to the study and intervention on decision-making, the ability to create a consistent life project, human consciousness and reflection based on this experience, which is partly subjective.
Furthermore, as this current of psychologists assimilates ideas such as existential search his speech usually refers to the “potentialities “of the human being, that is, those stages of his development that separate him from the state to which he aspires. The nature of this development is not biological, but much more ineffable: it is a progression of subjective states in which the person constantly wonders why what is happening to them, the meaning of what they are experiencing, and what they can do to improve their situation.
Taking into account that “what you are experiencing” is something totally private and out of reach of outsiders, It is understood that from a humanistic perspective this existential search is the responsibility of the subject who experiences it and that the psychologist has a secondary role as a facilitator of the process Complicated, right? Well, this is the animal in search of meaning that Humanistic Psychology faces.
summarizing
Humanistic Psychology takes characteristics of existentialism and the phenomenology and proposes a study of the human being, understanding it as a conscious, intentional being, in constant development and whose mental representations and subjective states are a valid source of knowledge about itself. Furthermore, he understands that objectifiable behavior is caused by subjective mental processes, an aspect in which he radically differs from behaviorism.
A psychologist who subscribes to this current will most likely deny that the study of thought has to start only from matter and experimentation, since this would imply an unacceptable dose of reductionism. Instead, it will surely emphasize the variability of human experiences and the importance of the social context in which we inhabit. By bringing psychology closer to what has become known as social Sciences we can say that Humanistic Psychology admits the connection between philosophy, moral theory, science and technology, and rejects the vision of science as something neutral far from any ideological or political position.
A manifesto
Humanistic Psychology can be understood as an inevitable fruit of the change in mentality that the 20th century brought about or, more specifically, a kind of psychology of postmodernity . It shares with postmodern philosophy the denial of a hegemonic discourse (the materialist approach typical of modern science) that seeks to explain all of reality, or, at least, those areas of reality on which it is worth training experts.
The science inherited from August Comte’s positivism, humanist psychologists point out, It is useful to describe reality, but not to explain it Human beings, unlike what happens with scientific instruments, experience reality by giving it meaning, creating fictions and ways of narrating that order facts according to a series of beliefs and ideas, many of them difficult to express verbally and impossible to measure. Therefore, A discipline that aims to study the way of thinking and experiencing human beings will have to adapt its methodology and content to this “meaningful” dimension of the human being. In short, it must study and provide content about the existential search that characterizes us.
From this “manifesto” of Humanistic Psychology its limitations also arise
These psychologists face challenges that many other scientists renounce from the beginning: on the one hand, the need to combine knowledge about the measurable aspects of human psychology with subjective phenomena, and on the other, the difficult mission of creating a solid theoretical corpus while renouncing the claim of universality of its explanations. The latter is important, since our subjective experiences are characterized by being linked to the culture we inhabit, but also to a lot of variables that make us unique. Perhaps that is why today it is practically impossible to talk about specific models of the functioning of human thought supported by Humanistic Psychology.
Each author of this current presents his own differentiated content according to the idiosyncrasy of his thinking and the field he deals with and, in fact, it is difficult to know which psychologists fully embrace Humanistic Psychology and which are only partially influenced by it. Although there are authors whose ideas are recurrent in the literature of other psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers the proposals of other authors are more “isolated” or are too specific to be extrapolated to other areas.
The art of complicating life
In short, if science is concerned with answering the question “as?” the existential search that Humanistic Psychology faces is made up of a multitude of much more complicated questions: “because?” . Not giving up anything, in certain aspects, is equivalent to complicating your life; This search for meaning may indeed be a journey of no return, but the prospect of wandering eternally in the wastelands of existential doubt does not seem to daunt us.
In fact, we will sometimes march along their imaginary routes even though this may lead to more problems than benefits from a purely economic and rational perspective, and even though Agrippa’s trilemma keeps a close eye on us during this progression of questions and answers. Therefore, no matter how debatable its contents may be from a scientific perspective (and, on some occasions, from each person’s own criteria), It is good to know of the existence of psychologists who have considered the need to complicate their lives just as the people they intend to study and serve do
People affiliated with Humanistic Psychology may lack the endorsement that the cognitive-behavioral psychology or neurology. But, of course, they cannot be accused of starting from an advantageous position.
