Trying to delve into the different approaches within psychology, the Humanist Psychology is, in post-modernity, one of the rising currents. Today we discover its history and fundamental aspects.

Humanist Psychology: discovering a new paradigm

If you are an observant person, you may have noticed that people have a certain tendency to complicate their lives by asking why things happen . I’m not referring to those aseptic “why’s” that doctors, engineers and programmers ask themselves, but to that other version of the question that points to the total uselessness of its possible answers : “What does this photograph suggest to me,” “why am I the person I’ve become,” “what am I doing walking down the street? .

These are not questions whose answers will get us out of a predicament, and yet we spend time and effort trying to answer them: a bad business from an economic perspective.

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

In the end, this attachment to the transcendent has accompanied us since time immemorial and does not seem to have gone badly 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 Humanist Psychology, a psychological current that does not renounce to understand all aspects of what makes us human.

What is Humanist Psychology?

The first clues when it comes to placing Humanist Psychology on the map of psychological currents can be found in one of its main standard-bearers: Abraham Maslow (the creator of 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 behavioural and objectivist current, which is based on the positivist paradigm of science .

In second place is what he calls “the Freudian psychologies”, which emphasize the role of the subconscious in explaining human behavior and especially psychopathology.

Finally, Maslow speaks of the current to which he ascribes himself: Humanist Psychology.This third current, however, has a peculiarity. Humanist Psychology does not deny the two previous approaches, but 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, a singular 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, and simplifying everything a little, the conception of phenomenology can be approached by explaining the idea of phenomenon .In fact, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger defines it as “that in which something can become apparent, 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 is true for those subjective aspects of which we are aware. In other words, it appeals to intellectual and emotional experience as the legitimate sources of knowledge, a claim that is also included in Humanist Psychology.

Existentialism

Existentialism, on the other hand, 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 reflexive thanks to consciousness . From consciousness arises the vital anguish of searching for meaning in existence.
  2. The existence of the human being is changing and dynamic by its own nature, that is, it is developing . Through the development of existence, concretized in its decision making, the essence is reached, which may be authentic or inauthentic depending on its congruence with the person’s life project.

In short, both phenomenology and existentialism emphasize the consciousness and the capacity of man to decide, at all times, what to do, moved in the last instance by his intentionality and not by his biology or environment, thus moving away from innatism and environmentalism . Humanist Psychology gathers this heritage and orients it to the study and intervention on decision making, the capacity to create a consistent life project, human consciousness and reflection from this experience, which is partly subjective.

Moreover, as this current of psychologists assimilates ideas such as the existential search , their discourse usually refers to the ” potentialities ” of the human being, that is to say, 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 himself why what is happening to him, the meaning of what he is living, and what he can do to improve his situation.

Bearing in mind that “what he is experiencing” is something totally private and out of reach of other people’s eyes, it is understood that from a humanist perspective this existential search is the responsibility of the subject himself who experiences it and that the psychologist has a secondary role as facilitator of the process . Complicated, isn’t it? For this is the animal in search of meaning that Humanist Psychology faces.

Summarizing

Thus, Humanist Psychology takes characteristics from existentialism and 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 oneself.

A psychologist who subscribes to this trend will most probably deny that the study of thought has to start only from matter and experimentation, since this would suppose an unbearable dose of reductionism. Instead, he will surely emphasize the variability of human experiences and the importance of the social context in which we live. When approaching psychology to what has become known as social sciences , it can be said that Humanist Psychology admits the connection between philosophy , moral theory, science and technique, and rejects the vision of science as something neutral far from any ideological or political position.

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 psychology of post-modernity . It shares with post-modern philosophy the negation 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 about which it is worthwhile to train experts.

The science inherited from August Comte’s positivism, humanist psychologists point out, is useful to describe reality, but not to explain it . The human being, contrary to what happens with scientific instruments, experiences reality by giving it meaning, creating fictions and forms of narration 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 human beings will have to adapt its methodology and contents to this “signifying” dimension of the human being. It must, in short, study and contribute content about the existential search that characterises us.

Several 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 outset: 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 their 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 speak of concrete models of the functioning of human thought sustained by Humanist Psychology.

Each author of this current presents his or her own contents, differentiated according to the idiosyncrasy of their thought and the field they work in, and in fact it is difficult to know which psychologists embrace Humanist Psychology totally 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 fields.

The Art of Making Life Difficult

In short, if science is concerned with answering the question “how?” , the existential search that Humanist Psychology faces is made up of a multitude of much more complicated questions: “why?” . To renounce nothing, in certain aspects, is equivalent to complicating one’s life; this search for meaning may, in fact, be a journey without return, but the prospect of wandering eternally through the moors of existential doubt does not seem to frighten 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 even though Agrippa’s trilemma will be watching us closely during this progression of questions and answers. Therefore, no matter how debatable their contents may be from a scientific point of view (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 in the same way as the people they intend to study and serve.

People attached to Humanistic Psychology may lack the endorsement enjoyed by cognitive-behavioral psychology or neurology. But, of course, they cannot be accused of starting from an advantageous situation.

Bibliographic references:

  • Camino Roca, J. L. (2013). The Origins of Humanist Psychology: Transactional Analysis in psychotherapy and education . Madrid: CCS.
  • Heidegger, M. (1926). Being and Time . Version of School of Philosophy University ARCIS]. Retrieved from http://espanol.free-ebooks.net/ebook/Ser-y-el-Tiem .

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  • Maslow, A. H. (1982). The Creative Personality . Barcelona: Kairós.