HUMANISTIC
• Based on the fundamental principle that man is
good and can change. The paradigm
emphasizes “looking at the whole individual
and stresses concepts such as free will, selfefficacy, and self-actualization rather than
concentrating on dysfunction, humanistic
psychology strives to help people fulfill their
potential and maximize their well-being”
(Cherry & Lacy, 2020).
EXISTENTIAL
• It considers “human nature to be open-ended,
flexible and capable of an enormous range of
experience” (Norcross & Lambert, 2011) where
“the person is in a constant process of
becoming” (Vos, Craig, & Cooper, 2014).
Moreover, it also sees that human beings know
how to solve their issues and concerns only that
when confronted with challenges and
difficulties, a guide and a facilitator will help
them find solutions that are technically
inherent in them.
HOLISTIC-DYNAMIC THEORY
AKA Abraham Harold Maslow
Born: 1-Apr-1908
Birthplace: Brooklyn, NY
Died: 8-Jun-1970
Location of death: Menlo Park, CA
Cause of death: Heart Failure
Gender: Male
Religion: Jewish
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Psychologist
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Hierarchy of
Needs
Maslow’s View of Motivation
• Maslow adopted a holistic approach to motivation: That is, the
whole person, not any single part or function, is motivated.
• Motivation is usually complex, meaning that a person’s behavior
may spring from several separate motives.
• People are continually motivated by one need or another. When
one need is satisfied, it ordinarily loses its motivational power
and is then replaced by another need.
• All people everywhere are motivated by the same basic needs.
The manner in which people in different cultures obtain food,
build shelters, express friendship, and so forth may vary widely,
but the fundamental needs for food, safety, and friendship are
common to the entire species.
• Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy
Hierarchy of Needs
• conative needs - Needs that pertain to willful and
purposive striving, for example Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs.
• instinctoid needs - Needs that are innately determined but
that can be modified through learning. The frustration of
instinctoid needs leads to various types of pathology.
• aesthetic needs - Needs for art, music, beauty, and the like.
Although they may be related to the basic conative needs,
aesthetic needs are a separate dimension.
• neurotic needs - Nonproductive needs that are opposed to
the basic needs and that block psychological health
whether or not they are satisfied.
Characteristics of Needs
• The lower the need is in the hierarchy, the greater are its
strength, potency, and priority. The higher needs are weaker
needs.
• Higher needs appear later in life. Physiological and safety needs
arise in infancy. Belongingness and esteem needs arise in
adolescence. The need for self-actualization does not arise until
midlife.
• Because higher needs are less necessary for actual survival, their
gratification can be postponed. Failure to satisfy a higher need
does not produce a crisis. Failure to satisfy a lower need does
produce a crisis. For this reason, Maslow called lower needs
deficit, or deficiency, needs; failure to satisfy them produces a
deficit or lack in the individual.
Characteristics of Needs
• Although higher needs are less necessary for survival, they
contribute to survival and growth. Satisfaction of higher
needs leads to improved health and longevity. For this
reason, Maslow called higher needs growth, or being,
needs.
• Satisfaction of higher needs is also beneficial
psychologically which leads to contentment, happiness, and
fulfillment.
• Gratification of higher needs requires better external
circumstances (social, economic, and political) than does
gratification of lower needs.
• A need does not have to be satisfied fully before the next
need in the hierarchy becomes important.
The Self-Actualizers
• metamotivation - The motives of self-actualizing
people, including especially the B-values.
• Metaneeds - States of growth or being toward
which self-actualizers evolve.
• metapathology - Illness, characterized by absence
of values, lack of fulfillment, and loss of meaning,
that results from deprivation of self-actualization
needs.
• Jonah complex - The fear of being or doing one’s
best.
PERSON-CENTERED THEORY
AKA Carl Ransom Rogers
Born: 8-Jan-1902
Birthplace: Oak Park, IL
Died: 4-Feb-1987
Location of death: San Diego, CA
Cause of death: Heart Failure
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Psychologist
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Non-directive
theory of psychology
Basic Assumptions
• Rogers believed that there is a tendency for all matter,
both organic and inorganic, to evolve from simpler to
more complex forms. For the entire universe, a creative
process, rather than a disintegrative one, is in
operation. Rogers called this process the formative
tendency and pointed to many examples from nature.
• An interrelated and more pertinent assumption is the
actualizing tendency, or the tendency within all
humans (and other animals and plants) to move
toward completion or fulfillment of potentials. This
tendency is the only motive people possess.
The Development of the Self
• actualization tendency - The basic human
motivation to actualize, maintain, and enhance the
self.
• self-concept - Aspects of one’s being and
experiences that an individual is consciously aware
of.
• organismic self - A more general term than selfconcept; refers to the entire person, including
those aspects of existence beyond awareness.
• ideal self - One’s view of self as one would like to
be.
The Development of the Self
• positive regard - The need to be loved, liked,
or accepted by another.
• unconditional positive regard - The need to
be accepted and prized by another without
any restrictions or qualifications; one of three
“necessary and sufficient” therapeutic
conditions.
• positive self-regard - The experience of
valuing one’s self.
Barriers to the Development of the Self
• incongruence - The perception of
discrepancies between organismic self, selfconcept, and ideal self.
• conditions of worth - Restrictions or
qualifications attached to one person’s regard
for another.
• conditional positive regard - Approval, love,
or acceptance granted only when a person
expresses desirable behaviors and attitudes.
EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• Existential psychology is rooted in the
philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European
philosophers.
• May took the view that modern people
frequently run away both from making
choices and from assuming responsibility.
ROLLO REESE MAY
Rollo May was born in Ohio in 1909, but grew up
in Michigan. After graduating from Oberlin
College in 1930, he spent three years roaming
throughout eastern and southern Europe as an
itinerant artist. When he returned to the United
States, he entered the Union Theological
Seminary, from which he received a Master of
Divinity degree. He then served for two years as
a pastor, but quit in order to pursue a career in
psychology. He received a Ph.D. in clinical
psychology from Columbia in 1949 at the age of
40. During his professional career, he served as
lecturer or visiting professor at a number of
universities, conducted a private practice as a
psychotherapist, and wrote a number of popular
books on the human condition. May died in
1994 at age 85.
Background of Existentialism
• Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and
theologian, is usually considered to be the founder of
modern existentialism. Like later existentialists, he
emphasized a balance between freedom and
responsibility.
• People acquire freedom of action by expanding their
self-awareness and by assuming responsibility for
their actions. However, this acquisition of freedom
and responsibility is achieved at the expense of
anxiety and dread.
Existentialism
• The first tenet of existentialism is that existence take
precedence over essence, meaning that process and
growth are more important than product and stagnation.
• Second, existentialists oppose the artificial split between
subject and object.
• Third, they stress people's search for meaning in their
lives.
• Fourth, they insist that each of us is responsible for who
we are and what we will become.
• Fifth, most take an anti-theoretical position, believing
that theories tend to objectify people.
Basic Concepts
• Dasein - An existential term meaning a sense
of self as a free and responsible person whose
existence is embedded in the world of things,
of people, and of self-awareness.
– Umwelt, or the environment around us
– Mitwelt, or our world with other people
– Eigenwelt, or our relationship with our self.
• nonbeing - The awareness of the possibility of
one’s not being, through death or loss of
awareness.
Processes
• anxiety - The experience of the threat of imminent nonbeing.
– Normal Anxiety. Growth produces normal anxiety, defined as that
which is proportionate to the threat, does not involve repression, and
can be handled on a conscious level.
– Neurotic Anxiety. Neurotic anxiety is a reaction that is
disproportionate to the threat and that leads to repression and
defensive behaviors. It is felt whenever one's values are transformed
into dogma. Neurotic anxiety blocks growth and productive action.
• guilt - An ontological characteristic of human existence arising
from our separation from the natural world (Umwelt), from
other people (Mitwelt), or from oneself (Eigenwelt).
• intentionality - The underlying structure that gives meaning
to our experience.
Processes
• Care is an active process that suggests that things matter.
• Love means to care, to delight in the presence of another
person, and to affirm that person's value as much as one's
own.
– sex as a natural biological function
– Eros is a psychological desire that seeks an enduring union with a
loved one. It may include sex, but it is built on care and tenderness.
– Philia, an intimate nonsexual friendship between two people, takes
time to develop and does not depend on the actions of the other
person.
– Agape is an altruistic or spiritual love that carries with it the risk of
playing God. Agape is undeserved and unconditional.
• Will, defined as a conscious commitment to action
Freedom and Destiny
• Freedom comes from an understanding of our destiny. We are
free when we recognize that death is a possibility at any
moment and when we are willing to experience changes, even
in the face of not knowing what those changes will bring.
– Freedom of doing, or freedom of action, which he called
existential freedom
– Freedom of being, or an inner freedom, which he called
essential freedom
• May defined destiny as "the design of the universe speaking
through the design of each one of us." In other words, our
destiny includes the limitations of our environment and our
personal qualities, including our mortality, gender, and genetic
predispositions.
The Power of Myth
• People have lost many of their traditional myths, they turn to
religious cults, drugs, and popular culture to fill the vacuum.
• The Oedipus myth has had a powerful effect on our culture
because it deals with such common existential crises as birth,
separation from parents, sexual union with one parent and
hostility toward the other, independence in one's search for
identity, and finally death.
• Like archetypes, myths can contribute to psychological growth
if people will embrace them and allow them to open up a new
reality. Tragically, many people deny their universal myths and
thus risk alienation, apathy, and emptiness—the principal
ingredients of psychopathology.
Psychopathology & Psychotherapy
• May saw apathy and emptiness-not anxiety and guilt-as the
chief existential disorders of our time.
• People have become alienated from the natural world
(Umwelt), from other people (Mitwelt), and from themselves
(Eigenwelt).
• Psychopathology is a lack of connectedness and an inability to
fulfill one's destiny.
• The goal of May's psychotherapy was not to cure patients of
any specific disorder, but to make them more fully human.
• May said that the purpose of psychotherapy is to set people
free, to allow them to make choices and to assume
responsibility for those choices.
May’s View of Human Nature
• May viewed people as complex beings, capable
of both tremendous good and immense evil.
• People have become alienated from the world,
from other people, and, most of all, from
themselves.
• On the dimensions of a concept of humanity,
May rates high on free choice, teleology, social
influences, and uniqueness.
• On the issue of conscious or unconscious
forces, his theory takes a middle position