In this lesson we will introduce the perspective of
humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology first began to crystallize
as a movement in the 1950s. It was part of a protest against the two
dominant forces in psychology at that time, psychoanalysis and
behaviorism.
Slide two. Humanistic psychologists, in contrast to both psychoanalysis
and behaviorism, emphasized the importance of phenomenology.
Phenomenology means one’s lived experience. Their second emphasis was on
positive human potential. Later, part of the humanistic movement came to
be known as the human potential movement. Back in the 1950s, a phrase
that the humanistic theorist Maslow was particularly fond of was: To be
all you can be (a phrase that have since been widely used outside of the
humanistic movement). Thus, combining these two emphases, phenomenology
and human potential, and humanistic psychology emphasizes your potential
to experience life joyously, clearly and fully. That is the essential
mandate guiding the humanistic movement.
Slide three. According the humanistic psychology, the key to that goal
of a full and fulfilling life is openness to experience. Openness to
experience, in this perspective, is a way of being, a way of approaching
life, not a trait, as in the five factor model. Openness to experience
is the key to realizing one’s experiential potentials for two reasons.
First because your world and yourself are only as open to you as you are
open to them. Consider me as a cautionary—even tragic—tale from the
humanistic perspective. If I am eating lunch, I might have the most
delicious food melting over my palate, but I pay no attention to it.
Instead I’m thinking, hmm, what do I need to get done this afternoon. Or
I’m walking down a pathway and all around me there are beautiful
fragrances wafting and leaves shimmering in a gentle breeze, and do I
pay attention to any of this? Nope, I’m thinking about all the stuff I
need to get done this afternoon. If I’m not open to the world around me,
then I’m not going to be able to actualize those potentials for
experiencing that the world around me is offering. And so too inside
myself. Inside of me there might be very rich experiences—feelings of
intimacy, of joy, even feelings of sadness can be a source of
actualization if I were to fully open to the source and substance of
those feelings—but I deny my inner experiences and in that way narrow
and impoverish my experience of life. In sum, only if I’m open to the
inner feelings and the external experiences available to me can I
realize my experiential potentials. A second way in which openness to
experience is a key to realizing your experiential potentials is that
your own experience is your best feedback as to what is going to bring
you joy and fulfillment in life. Can you learn that by listening to one
of my lectures, from reading a psychology book, from getting advice from
other people? Unlikely, because every human being is different and the
sorts of things that will bring you joy, the sorts of capabilities that
you have that you can actualize, are different from those of others. The
only way to know what your capabilities are is to pay attention to your
own experiences. What brings you joy, what makes you feel like you’re on
the right path--those are the best predictors of what will bring you joy
and make you feel you are on the right path in the future. Your own past
and recent experiences are your best guide to what your future
experiences will be like, but to use them as a guide you have to pay
attention to what brings you joy or feels right for you now. For those
two reasons, openness to experience was considered the key to realizing
positive human potentials.
Slide four. Carl Rogers (one of the two most important humanistic
theorists) went further, positing an innate actualizing tendency (an
inborn drive to be all that you could be) that was guided by what he
called “inner organismic valuing processes” (processes that would guide
you towards that path that was most self-actualizing for you). These are
strong statements that many people found too optimistic. But are they?
According to Rogers, these innate organismic valuing processes is the
totality of your experience… and, in support of Rogers, that is a lot of
experiencing. So far as we know the most complex device in the universe
is, in fact, the human brain, with it’s tens of billions of neurons and
trillions of interconnections amongst those neurons. That is a lot of
computational power and it is sitting inside your skull and its job is
to monitor what is good for you… what makes you happy or unhappy, what
you do well or poorly, and so your brain, your experience, your own
organismic valuing processes are the best source of information for how
to actualize your own capabilities. But in order to use them, you need
to be open to your experience, to the totality of your organismic
valuing processes. To quote Rogers from his 1961 book "On becoming a
person", if you let a person be and they’re open to hearing and trusting
the organismic valuing processes, you will find that “over time the
choices made, the directions pursued, the actions taken are increasingly
constructive personally and tend toward more the realistic social
harmony with others.” Now this may seem like a very optimistic
statement, but Rogers claims that he was basing it on his experience as
a person, as a researcher, and as a therapist.
Slide five. As a therapist and as one of the earliest systematic
researchers of therapy outcomes, Rogers found that clients in the course
of therapy tended to change in the direction of being more open to their
experiences and more self-actualizing, being more--in his terminology--a
fully functioning person. Specifically, Rogers observed clients moving
in the following directions? One, they became more open to experience.
His clients might arrive focused on their own neurotic and
self-conscious needs and so closed off to their own inner experiences
and the world around them; but over time they would become more open,
more disclosing about what they were experiencing and feeling, both the
good and the bad. As the became more open to their inner experiences,
they became more aware of how their feelings are always fluid and
changing. This is what Rogers meant by being process; that who you are
is a process, that your feelings and wishes keep changing, and you can
accept rather than deny those changes. Being open to experience also
reveals the complexity of experience; that you have a multitude of
feelings and wishes. Perhaps with the person you love you may experience
irritation and desire and frustration and tenderness all at the same
time. Or perhaps with your job you may experience pride and
disappointment and excitement and anxiety. Accepting the totality of
these complex experiences is what Rogers meant by being complexity. You
are open to the totality of that experience in its full complexity and
do not force your experience to fit some simple rule like "I love my
wife" or "I hate my job".
Third, as people become more fully functioning they becoming more
trusting of their complex and fluid experience as a basis for guiding
their choices; thus, self-trust enables self-determination. Only if you
trust that your thoughts, feelings, and judgments are worthy will you
give them the attention and consideration necessary for them to guide
your decisions. Finally, as many researchers have noted, giving trust
and acceptance to oneself seems to go hand in had with giving trust and
accept to others.
Slide six. The other important humanistic theorist was Abraham Maslow.
Maslow and Rogers, while working independently, were contemporaries and
developed very similar ideas.
While Rogers used the phrase fully functioning, Maslow preferred the
phrase self-actualizing, but as we will see Roger’s description of the
fully functioning person and Maslow’s description of the
self-actualizing person share many similarities. The self-actualizing
person was a person was appreciating and clearly experiencing the self,
others and the process of life—that is, they were fully open. That
openness meant their experiences were more accurate; they can read their
own feelings clearly; they can read the expressions of others clearly;
they can experience everyday events more clearly. I recall one of
Maslow’s examples being tasting food; because the self-actualizing
person was fully open to and attentive to the gustatory sensation in the
moment, they were able to experience it more clearly, more accurately
than others.
The self-actualizing person also experience the self, others, and life
in a more broadminded, open, and objective way, in part because the
self-actualizing person does not frame their experience from a single
perspective, whether it’s an ego-centric perspective (just seeing the
world in terms of my own needs and my own values), a group-centric
centered perspective (just seeing the world in terms of how my group
feels or how will this impact my group), or culture-centric perspective
(just seeing the world from the perspective of the culture in which I
was raised). Instead, the self-actualizing person, while recognizing
that he or she has experienced a particular family and cultural
background and lives in a particular place and time, can also step
outside of their own needs and the perspectives of their group and
culture and from that broader perspective be able to appreciate how a
different person from a different perspective could view a situation.
The self-actualizing person tends to be self-directed, creative,
spontaneous, and these of course all go together, in that an individual
who can trust themselves and act on the basis of their own judgments is
open to something new, creative, or spontaneous.
Finally, the self-actualizing person is more prone to peak experiences.
Peak experiences is yet another of Maslow’s phrases that has certainly
caught on in our culture. But what does it mean. It does not mean having
to be on the peak of a mountain or at the peak of your profession.
Rather, it means moments of fullest self-actualizing, moments when all
of the above qualities—being self-directed and creative and appreciative
and clear—are at their most surpassing level. And this can happen in the
most ordinary moments. You might be making a soup and clearly tasting
the soup and clearly smelling the soup and, consequently, able to trust
your judgment, spontaneously now adding more water, then creatively
adding a pinch of cayenne. Your openness transforms this seemingly
mundane moment into a peak experience in which you are fully
appreciating and clearly experiencing the process of making the soup,
and you are fully engaged in the process in a creative and self-directed
way. Or as another example, while having a conversation with someone and
you are fully present, giving them your full and open attention, so that
that you appreciate their experience with surpassing clarity and
understanding. You feel completely engaged with that other person,
transforming a simple conversation into a moment of complete
interpersonal connection.
In sum, Rogers and Maslow’s views of a fully functioning or
self-actualizing person share and exemplify the humanistic emphasis on
living fully and on openness to experience as the key to being fully
functioning and self-actualizing.
But then the question arises: what stops us from being fully functioning
or self-actualizing? Rogers devoted much of his career to answering that
question and we’ll examine his answer to that question in the next
lesson.
