Humanistic Psychology: history, theory and basic principles

Throughout the History of Psychology, many explanatory models of behavior and the mind have emerged human that, starting from different ideas and purposes, try to help us understand more about ourselves themselves. In this sense, humanist 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 their life. This, of course, is reflected in Humanist Psychology, which we will learn about throughout this article.

Trying to delve into the different approaches within psychology, the Humanistic Psychology it is, in postmodernity, one of the currents on the rise and even today it is very influential. Today we discover its history and fundamental aspects.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

Humanistic Psychology: discovering a new paradigm

If you are an observant person,

You may have noticed that people have a certain tendency to complicate our liveswondering the why of things. I am not referring to those aseptic "why" that doctors, engineers and programmers ask themselves, but to that other version of the question that points to the utter futility of your possible answers: "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 a bind, and yet we spend time and effort trying to answer them - a bad deal from an economic perspective.

Are we to understand, therefore, that this tendency towards the useless is an imperfection in our way of thinking? It probably isn't.

At the end of the day, this attachment to the transcendent keeps us company from time immemorial and it doesn't seem to us to have gone bad since then. In any case, maybe 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 Today we know as Humanist Psychology, a psychological current that does not renounce to understand all aspects of what makes us humans.

What is Humanistic Psychology?

The first clues when it comes to placing Humanist Psychology on the map of psychological currents are found in one of the main champions of it: Abraham Maslow (the creator of what is now known as the 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 starts from the positivist paradigm of science and that it deals with objectifiable behavioral phenomena, without attributing mental causes to them.

Second is what he calls "the 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 what symbolic in people's lives, by generating concepts capable of shaping the way in which human beings guide their lives.

Finally, Maslow speaks of the current to which he ascribes: Humanist Psychology. This third stream, however, has a peculiarity. Humanist Psychology does not deny the two previous approaches, but rather embraces them starting from another philosophy of science. Beyond being a series of methods through which to study and intervene on the human being, it has its reason for being in a way of understanding things, asingular 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 bit, the conception of the phenomenology can be approached by explaining the idea ofphenomenonIn fact, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger defines it as "that in which something can be made patent, 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 capable of experiencing "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 conscious.

That is, it appeals to the intellectual and emotional experience as the legitimate sources of knowledge, a claim that also includes Humanist Psychology. This means, among other things, that from this paradigm the subjective is not just a by-product. 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 its postulates that most influence Humanist Psychology are the following:

1. Human existence is reflective thanks to consciousness. From consciousness arises the vital anguish of looking for a meaning to existence.
2. The existence of the human being is changing and dynamic by its own nature, that is, it develops. Through the development of existence, concretized in its decision making, the essence is reached, which can be authentic or inauthentic depending on its congruence with the person's life project.

Ultimately, both phenomenology and existentialism emphasize consciousness and man's ability to decide, at all times, what to do, ultimately driven by their intentionality and not by their biology or environment, moving away so from nativity and the environmentalism. Humanist Psychology collects this heritage and guides it to study and intervention on decision-making, the ability to create a consistent life project, human consciousness and reflection from this experience, which is subjective in part.

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 rather more ineffable: it is a progression of subjective states in which the person constantly asks why what is happening to him, the meaning of what he is experiencing, and what he can do to improve his situation.

Taking into account that "what you are experiencing" is something totally private and out of reach of other people's eyes, It is understood that from a humanistic perspective this existential search is the responsibility of the own subject who experiences it and that the psychologist has a secondary role as facilitator of the process. Complicated, right? For this is the animal in search of meaning that Humanist 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, constantly 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 it radically differs from behaviorism.

A psychologist who adheres to this trend will most likely deny that the study of thought have to start only from matter and experimentation, since this would suppose an unaffordable 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 betweenphilosophy, moral theory, science and technique, and rejects the vision of science as something neutral removed from any ideological positioning or political.

A manifesto

Humanist 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 postmodern psychology. It shares with postmodern philosophy the denial of a hegemonic discourse (the materialistic 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, the humanistic psychologists point out, it is useful to describe reality, but not to explain it. The human being, contrary to what happens with scientific instruments, experiences reality giving it meaning, creating fictions and ways of narrating that order the facts according to a series of beliefs and ideas, many of them difficult to express verbally and impossible to measure. Therefore, a discipline that intends to study the way of thinking and experiencing of the human being will have to adapt its methodology and its contents to this "significant" dimension of the human being. He must, in short, study and contribute content about the existential search that characterizes us.

Various limitations of the humanist model

From this "manifesto" of Humanist Psychology its limitations are also born.

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 concrete models of the functioning of human thought supported by Humanist Psychology.

Each author of this current presents their own differentiated contents according to the idiosyncrasy of his thought and the field from which he is based. occupies and, in fact, it is difficult to know which psychologists fully embrace Humanistic Psychology and which are only partly influenced by her. 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 your life

In short, if science deals with answering the question "as?", the existential search that Humanist Psychology faces is made up of a multitude of much more complicated questions: "why?". Not giving up anything, in certain aspects, is equivalent to complicating your life; This search for meaning may in fact be a journey of no return, but the prospect of eternally wandering the wastelands of existential doubt does not seem to daunt us.

In fact, sometimes we will march through their imaginary routes even though this may bring us more problems than benefits from a purely economic and rational perspective, and although Agrippa's trilemma keep a close eye on us during this Q&A progression. Therefore, no matter how debatable its contents are from the scientific point of view (and, on some occasions, from each one'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 in Humanistic Psychology may lack the endorsement enjoyed by the cognitive behavioral psychology wave neurology. But, of course, they cannot be accused of starting from an advantageous situation.

Bibliographic references:

• Boeree, G. (2003). Theories of personality, by Abraham Maslow. Translation: Rafael Gautier.
• Camino Roca, J. L. (2013). The Origins of Humanistic Psychology: Transactional Analysis in psychotherapy and education. Madrid: CCS.
• Heidegger, M. (1926). Being and Time. [Version of the ARCIS University School of Philosophy]. Recovered from http://espanol.free-ebooks.net/ebook/Ser-y-el-Tiem...
• Maslow, A. H. (1982). The Creative Personality. Barcelona: Kairos.
• Rosal Cortés, R. (1986). Personal growth (or self-realization): goal of humanistic psychotherapies. Anuario de psicología / The UB Journal of psychology. No.: 34.