Humanistic Psychology
Overview:
Throughout history many individuals and groups have affirmed the inherent value and dignity of human beings. They have spoken out against ideologies, beliefs and practices, which held people to be merely the means for accomplishing economic and political ends. They have reminded their contemporaries that the purpose of institutions is to serve and advance the freedom and power of their members. In Western civilization we honor the times and places, such as Classical Greece and Europe of the Renaissance, when such affirmations were expressed.
Humanistic Psychology is a contemporary manifestation of that ongoing commitment. Its message is a response to the denigration of the human spirit that has so often been implied in the image of the person drawn by behavioral and social sciences.
Ivan Pavlov's work with the conditioned reflex had given birth to an academic psychology in the United States led by John Watson, which came to be called "the science of behavior". Its emphasis on objectivity was reinforced by the success of the powerful methodologies employed in the natural sciences and by the philosophical investigations of the British empiricists, logical positivists and the operationalists, all of who sought to apply the methods and values of the physical sciences to questions of human behavior. Valuable knowledge was achieved in this quest. But if something was gained, something was also lost: The "First Force" systematically excluded the subjective data of consciousness and much information bearing on the complexity of the human personality and its development.
The "Second Force" emerged out of Freudian psychoanalysis and the depth psychologies of Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Otto Rank, Harry Stack Sullivan and others. These theorists focused on the dynamic unconscious - the depths of the human psyche whose contents, they asserted, must be integrated with those of the conscious mind in order to
Throughout history many individuals and groups have affirmed the inherent value and dignity of human beings. They have spoken out against ideologies, beliefs and practices, which held people to be merely the means for accomplishing economic and political ends. They have reminded their contemporaries that the purpose of institutions is to serve and advance the freedom and power of their members. In Western civilization we honor the times and places, such as Classical Greece and Europe of the Renaissance, when such affirmations were expressed.
Humanistic Psychology is a contemporary manifestation of that ongoing commitment. Its message is a response to the denigration of the human spirit that has so often been implied in the image of the person drawn by behavioral and social sciences.
Ivan Pavlov's work with the conditioned reflex had given birth to an academic psychology in the United States led by John Watson, which came to be called "the science of behavior". Its emphasis on objectivity was reinforced by the success of the powerful methodologies employed in the natural sciences and by the philosophical investigations of the British empiricists, logical positivists and the operationalists, all of who sought to apply the methods and values of the physical sciences to questions of human behavior. Valuable knowledge was achieved in this quest. But if something was gained, something was also lost: The "First Force" systematically excluded the subjective data of consciousness and much information bearing on the complexity of the human personality and its development.
The "Second Force" emerged out of Freudian psychoanalysis and the depth psychologies of Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Otto Rank, Harry Stack Sullivan and others. These theorists focused on the dynamic unconscious - the depths of the human psyche whose contents, they asserted, must be integrated with those of the conscious mind in order to