Humanistic school of thoughts in psychology
The basic idea behind the humanistic approach is that the other approaches are to focus on the negative side of psychology such as if you look at the psychodynamics approach it's all just doing negative thinking or a pressed thoughts. They called it the sick half of psychology which focuses on mental health problems.
Influencial period:
1950s-present
Contributors:
- Carl Rogers
- Abraham Maslow
Subject matter:
Basic premise:
Explanation:
Humanistic approach wanted to take a different view . So it's quite a positive approach. It's known as the third force in psychology after the behaviorist and the second psychodynamic approach. It looks at the individual, their subjective personal experience and self-determination. It's main focus is on the individual rather than the group or or all general rules.
The initial idea behind the humanistic approach and the first concept in the humanistic approach is freewill . They believe that individual has control over their own destiny you don't thoroughly believe in fate terms as active terms. Such as active agents are used in humanistic approach. They believe that any individual is an active agent in their own environment and in their own life.
According to them individual is unique so no two people are the same and that we can all react to the same stimulus in different ways. We can take our lives in different directions.
Another way to describe the humanistic approach is the person-centered approach.
Hierarchy of needs:
Hierarchy of need is quite a fundamental idea that we have certain levels that we wish to achieve and you need to work your way through the levels to achieve this top goal of self-actualization. we start from the bottom.
Physiological needs :
Maslow said that we need to make sure our physiological needs are seen to first off so we need to make sure that we can breathe, eat, drink, sleep and to reproduce.we need homeostasis .we need to excrete body wastes. These are our physiological needs.we need to satisfy these needs before anything else. Once we satisfy these needs we then go up to the next level.
safety needs:
Everyone wants security of body and health,security of employment, security of resources and properties. If a person wouldn't have security of resources so they might not be able to reach their self-actualization . If all of those are achieved you can then go to the next level.
love and belongingness need:
That is personal relationships so that friendships that family members that sexual intimacy having remained relationships and once you've achieved those you can go on next.
self-esteem:
your personal self-esteem is basically our confidence ,our sense of achievement,do feel respected by others and also respect others. If we achieve all of them then move on to next level.
Self-actualization:
self actualization is the desire to reach your full potential. So Abraham Maslow believes that We all strive for self-actualization. we strive to reach our full potential that we desire that we have this innate need. we have want to push towards personal growth and development. if we reach self-actualization we are fulfilled in our lives and feel satisfied. we have goals that we can achieve . we are goal orientated.
we're all striving for our morality or sense of right and wrong , being able to be creative and come up with new ideas being spontaneous seeking out new possibilities, problem-solving and lack of prejudice. so this is the idea that humans are always somewhere within this hierarchy of needs and we would need to satisfy the basic needs before we can move up to the next level .
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a key fundamental point of of the human experience and it's a really important concept within humanistic approach to psychology.
An updated version of the hierarchy of needs suggest that our baseline needs are not Maslow's LOM but just kind of an assumption of what most people would strike or think about another concept within the humanistic approach is something called quadrants and conference is links to our what we call our self-identity so what we are now and our self perception what we see ourselves and as being and the idea of conference is that if these two things are close you have conference and that's a good thing but if these two things are far apart they're incongruent and that's a bad thing. So there is a big gap between the self-image and the ideal self . So how you see yourself now and how you see yourself wanting today so there's not a great deal overlap there. There's a big difference and so yes self-actualization would be difficult here and at least some negative outcomes . so if there is incongruences the idea is that this would lead to a feeling of worthlessness to low self esteem.
Carl Rogers
.jpg)
He came up with idea that incongruence is a result of not having unconditional positive regard as a child. so unconditional positive regard is where a parent no matter what would love their child. they'd want the best for them. they would be proud of them they would dote on them. they would love their child regard. it doesn't matter what they end up with or sorry what what the child is like that they are giving to them. this unconditional positive regard they're being positive towards them . if they have limit set on love. so they say I will only love you if you are the captain of the football team or I only love you if you're getting a star. if the child is feeling that there are conditions set on the love , these are known as conditions of Worth and then that is what would lead to incongruence. so these are all really important terms you need to know congruent, in congruence ,unconditional positive regard. conditions of work is a positive term so you want unconditional positive regard. You don't want conditions of work and that would only sit in congruence and there be this big gap between your real self and your ideal self and that would lead to negative outcomes. you wouldn't be able to self actualize. Roger said,however there is a bit of positive here and this will end up acting as an evaluation. there are some real-world applications to the humanistic approach in therapy .Roger said that client centered therapy which is the humanistic therapy.client-centered therapy
The aim of client-centered therapy would be to reduce the gap between the perceived self and the ideal self he said that a therapist should offer this unconditional positive regard that a parent maybe didn't provide when the individual was a child.
Weaknesses:
it is seen as a really good thing
looking at weaknesses of the approach. One of the criticisms that has been put towards a humanistic approach is that it has poor real-life application.
You can compare it against some other approaches like the cognitive approach where you're looking at memory and how the human memory system works that's really helpful to know in the learning process,eyewitness testimony. Humanistic approach is quite difficult to see where these theories actually have applications and one areas that they do is in counseling and there's the humanistic approach person-centered therapy but other than counseling where else can we use these theories and that is one of the first weaknesses of the humanistic approach.
Another weakness is that it's quite hard to test so if you've got these theories such as self actualization reaching your own full potential or congruence of the gap between your perceived self and your ideal self . those are quite subjective. they're then quite hard to test and so it's hard to test you think that's known as unfalsifiable ,which you can't say what these things are. if you can't do tests into these things then how do we actually know they exist. So from an outsider's point of view that would be seen as a weakness.
Actually from a humanist point of view as Rogers say well it doesn't matter. this isn't a scientific method that looks at rules for general people and so why would you need to test it ,what you need to look at the individuals.
Good 👍
ReplyDelete