Trying to delve into the different approaches to psychology, Humanistic Psychology is, in post-modernity, one of the ascending currents. Today we discover its history and fundamental aspects.
Humanistic Psychology: discovering a new paradigm
If you’re an observant person, you may have noticed that people have a certain tendency to complicate our lives by asking us why things happen . I am not referring to those “why” aseptic doctors, engineers and programmers ask themselves, but the other version of the question that points to the utter futility of its possible answers : “What does this photograph suggest to me?” , “Why am I the person I have become?”, “What do I do while walking down the street?”
These are not questions whose answers take us out of a hurry and, however, we use time and effort to try to answer them: a bad business from an economic point of view.
Are we to understand, therefore, that this tendency towards the useless is an imperfection of our way of thinking? It probably isn’t.
After all, this attachment to the transcendent has been with us since time immemorial and, since then, we don’t seem to have gone wrong. Anyway, perhaps we should understand that the existential quest 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 fail to understand all aspects of what makes us human.
What is humanistic psychology?
The first clues to putting humanistic psychology on the map of psychological currents are 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 separate sciences or major categories from which the human psyche is studied. One of them is the behavioral and objectivist current, which departs from the positivist paradigm of science .
Second is what he calls “Freudian psychologies”, which emphasize the role of the subconscious in explaining human behavior and, particularly, psychopathology.
Finally, Maslow speaks of the current to which he attributes: Humanistic Psychology. This third current, however, has a peculiarity. Humanistic psychology does not deny the two previous approaches, but encompasses them based on another philosophy of science . In addition to being a series of methods through which to study and intervene in 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 is that?
It is not easy to describe in a few lines two concepts about which much has been written. In the first place, 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 be made visible, visible in itself” . For phenomenology, then, what we perceive as real is 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, intellectual and emotional experience is appealed to as a legitimate source of knowledge, a claim that also includes humanistic psychology.
Existentialism
In turn, existentialism is a philosophical current that proposes a reflection on human existence itself. Two of his postulates that most influenced Humanistic Psychology are the following:
- Human existence is reflective thanks to consciousness . From consciousness arises the vital anguish of seeking meaning in existence.
- The existence of the human being is changeable and dynamic by its very nature, that is, it develops . Through the development of existence, materialized in decision-making, the essence is reached, which can be authentic or inauthentic, depending on its congruence with the person’s life project.
In short, both phenomenology and existentialism emphasize man’s consciousness and capacity to decide, at all times, what to do, moved by his intentionality and not by his biology or environment, moving away from innateness and environmentalism . Humanistic psychology gathers this heritage and guides it towards the study and intervention in decision-making, the ability to create a consistent life project, human conscience and reflection from this experience, which is partially subjective.
In addition, as this current of psychologists assimilates ideas such as the existential quest , their discourse generally refers to the “ potentialities ” of human beings, that is, to the stages of their development that separate them from the state to which they aspire. The nature of this development is not biological, but more ineffable: it is a progression of subjective states in which the person constantly asks himself why he is going through, 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 beyond the reach of others, it is understood that, from a humanistic point of view, this existential quest is the responsibility of the subject who experiences it and that the psychologist has a secondary role of process facilitator . Complicated, right? Well, this is the animal in search of meaning that Humanistic Psychology faces.
In short
Thus, Humanistic Psychology takes characteristics from existentialism and phenomenology and proposes a study of the human being, understanding him as a conscious, intentional being, in constant development and whose mental representations and subjective states are a valid source of knowledge about himself.
A psychologist who subscribes to this current will probably deny that the study of thought has to start only with matter and experimentation, as this would imply an unpretentious dose of reductionism . Instead, it will certainly emphasize the variability of human experiences and the importance of the social context in which we live. When approaching psychology for what became known as the social sciences , it can be said that humanistic psychology admits the connection between philosophy , moral theory, science and technology and rejects the view of science as something neutral, far from any ideological or political position. .
a manifesto
Humanistic psychology can be understood as an inevitable result of the change in mentality that the 20th century meant or, more specifically, a type of postmodern psychology . It shares with postmodern philosophy the denial of a hegemonic discourse (the materialist approach to modern science) that seeks to explain all of reality or, at least, the areas of reality that are worth training specialists.
The science that inherited August Comte’s positivity, humanist psychologists point out, is useful for describing reality, but not for explaining it . Human beings, contrary to what happens with scientific instruments, experience reality by understanding it, 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 seeks to study the way of thinking and experiencing the human being will have to adapt its methodology and content to this “significant” dimension of the human being. In short, you must study and contribute content about the existential research that characterizes us.
Several limitations of the humanist model
From this “manifesto” of humanistic psychology, its limitations are also born .
These psychologists face challenges that many other scientists give up early on: 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 renounces the claim to the universality of his explanations. The latter is important, as our subjective experiences are characterized by being linked to the culture we inhabit, but also to many 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 supported by humanist psychology.
Each author of this current presents his own differentiated content according to the idiosyncrasy of his thought and the scope of his work 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 too specific to be extrapolated to other areas.
The art of complicating life
In short, if science is about answering the question “how?” , the existential research faced by humanistic psychology is made up of a multitude of much more complicated questions: “why?” Not giving up on anything, in some respects, is equivalent to complicating life; this quest for meaning may indeed be a journey of no return, but the prospect of endlessly wandering through the swamps of existential doubt does not seem to intimidate us.
Indeed, we will sometimes march along its imaginary routes, although this can lead to more problems than benefits from a purely economic and rational perspective, and although Agrippa’s trilemma follows us closely during this progression of questions and answers. Therefore, no matter how debatable their contents are from a scientific point of view (and, sometimes, from one’s own criteria), it is good to know about the existence of psychologists who raised the need to complicate life as well as the people who intend to study and serve.
People assigned to humanistic psychology may not have the support of cognitive behavioral psychology or neurology. But, of course, they cannot be accused of getting out of a win-win situation.
