The humanistic psychological approach to change combines some of the insights from the previous three approaches while at the same time developing its own. It emerged as a movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. The American Association of Humanistic Psychology describes it as ‘concerned with topics having little place in existing theories and systems: e.g. love, creativity, self, growth … self-actualization, higher values, being, becoming, responsibility, meaning … transcendental experience, peak experience, courage and related concepts’.
In this section we look at how the humanistic approach differs from the behavioural and cognitive approaches, list some of the key assumptions of this approach, and look at three important models within humanistic psychology.
Charts some of the similarities and differences between the psychoanalytic, behavioural, cognitive and humanistic approaches. Although taken from a article more concerned with counselling and psychotherapy, it illustrates where humanistic psychology stands in relation to the other approaches.
Humanistic psychology has a number of key areas of focus:
- The importance of subjective awareness as experienced by the individual.
- The importance of taking responsibility for one’s situations – or at least the assumption that whatever the situation there will be an element of choice in how you think, how you feel and how you act.
- The significance of the person as a whole entity (a holistic approach) in the sense that as humans we are not just what we think or what we feel, we are not just our behaviours. We exist within a social and cultural context.
In juxtaposition with Freud’s view of the aim of therapy as moving the individual from a state of neurotic anxiety to ordinary unhappiness, humanistic psychology has ‘unlimited aims … our prime aim is to enable the person to get in touch with their real self’ (Rowan, 1983).