Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic Psychology

Introduction

Humanistic psychology is best understood as a reaction to two other early psychological approaches. The first, psychodynamic, was developed by Sigmund Freud as a way of enquiring and comprehending the human brain (1). Sigmund Freud was the first to propose that much of our demeanour was perhaps leveraged by lifeless desires, which he theorised during his work as a neurological consultant at a children's clinic in Vienna (2). Freud tried to illustrate how these unconscious thoughts and desires could exterior through parapraxis (3), which are now renowned as Freudian falls, and studied the brain utilising methods such as free association and illusion interpretation. Dreams, as he saw them, were said to be "the royal road to the unconscious". Today many psychologists believe that the idea of a conscious/unconscious divide is slightly reductionist and prefer to believe that there are merely different levels of awareness.

Analysis

Another important early approach to psychology is behaviourism, which attempts to explain all behaviour as being learned from the environment. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, for example, demonstrated how animals can learn by reinforcement with his invention of the operant conditioning chamber (colloquially known as a 'Skinner box'). The box included a loudspeaker, lights, response lever, electrified floor and food dispenser. Using these, Skinner was able to train small animals to accomplish complicated tasks by manipulating their environment. Most famously, he managed to train pigeons to play table tennis (4). While Skinner was successful in showing how operant conditioning can influence our behaviour, John Broadus Watson and Ivan Pavlov were equally as successful in demonstrating the potential of classical conditioning (learning by association). During the controversial Little Albert study conducted in 1920 John Watson conditioned an 11 month old child to fear a small white rat by striking a steel bar with a hammer while the child was playing with the rat. Ivan Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by associating this sound with their feeding over a period of time. Both experiments show how a neutral stimulus can elicit a conditioned response when paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

Psychoanalysis and behaviourism both came about in the 1890's and were for a long time the only major schools of thought in psychology. Approximately 60 years later, however, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Clark Moustakas decided a more holistic approach was required. They believed that the human mind should be studied as a whole unit rather than as the sum of its individual parts and after several meetings in Detroit, Michigan they began to develop a new force that they called humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology is a modern way of looking at psychological issues and debates that focuses on human aspects and contexts for the development of its theories. It is sometimes referred to as the third force in psychology since it originated as a reaction to Sigmund Freud's aforementioned psychoanalysis theory and Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner et al's behaviourist ...