Humanistic Psychology: history, theory and basic principles.

The theoretical and philosophical bases of this important current in the academic and professional world.

Throughout the history of psychology, many explanatory models of behavior and the human mind have emerged that, starting from different ideas and purposes, try to help us understand more about ourselves. In this sense, humanistic philosophy has been very influential, and has given rise to its own paradigm in the world of Psychology.

As a philosophical current, humanism emphasizes the importance of the subjectivity of each individual and how important it is for each person to construct his or her own meaning in life. This, of course, is reflected in Humanistic Psychology, which we will get to know throughout this article.

Trying to delve deeper into the different approaches within psychology, the Humanistic Psychology is, in post-modernity, one of the rising currents, and even today it is very influential. Today we discover its history and fundamental aspects.

Humanistic psychology: discovering a new paradigm

If you are an observant person, you may have noticed that we people have a certain tendency to complicate our lives by asking ourselves why things happen. asking ourselves the why of things. I am not referring to those aseptic "why" questions that doctors, engineers and programmers ask themselves, but to that other version of the question that points towards the total futility of its possible answers.: "What does this photograph suggest to me?", "why am I the person I have become?", "what am I doing walking down the street?".

These are not questions whose answers are going to get us out of trouble, and yet we spend time and effort trying to answer them: bad business from an economic perspective.

Are we to understand, therefore, that this tendency toward uselessness is an imperfection of our way of thinking? Probably not.

After all, this attachment to the transcendent has been with us since time immemorial and we don't seem to have done badly since then. In any case, perhaps we should we should understand that the existential quest is one of those characteristics that define us as human beings.. Perhaps we should, if we want to better understand the logic that guides our thinking, look at the proposals of what we know today as Humanistic Psychology, a psychological current that does not renounce to understand all aspects of what makes us human.

What is Humanistic Psychology?

The first clues to situate Humanistic Psychology on the map of psychological currents can be found in one of its main standard bearers: Abraham Maslow (the creator of what is known today as Maslow's Pyramid of human needs). In his book The Creative PersonalityMaslow speaks of three sciences or large isolated categories from which the human psyche is studied. One of them is the behaviorist and objectivist current, which is based on the positivist paradigm of science and deals with behavioral and objectivist phenomena. and which deals with objectifiable behavioral phenomena, without attributing mental causes to them.

In second place is what he calls "Freudian psychologies", which emphasize the role of the subconscious in explaining human behavior and, especially, psychopathology. In addition, Humanistic Psychology is also inspired by the psychoanalytic current when considering the importance of the symbolic in people's lives, by generating concepts capable of capturing the way in which human beings orient their lives.

Finally, Maslow speaks of the current to which he ascribes himself: Humanistic Psychology. This third current, however, has a peculiarity. Humanistic psychology does not deny the two previous approaches, but embraces them on the basis of a different philosophy of science.. Beyond being a series of methods through which to study and intervene on the human being, it has its raison d'être in a way of understanding things, a singular philosophy. Concretely, this school is based on two philosophical movements: phenomenology and existentialism.

Phenomenology? existentialism? What is that?

It is not easy to describe in a few lines two concepts about which so much has been written. In the first place, and simplifying everything a bit, the conception of phenomenology can be approached by explaining the idea of phenomenonIn fact, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger defines it as "that in which something can be made patent, visible in itself".. For phenomenology, then, what we perceive as the real is the ultimate reality.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology emphasizes the fact that we are never able to experience "reality itself" directly (since our senses act as a filter of this information), while the opposite occurs with those subjective aspects of which we are aware.

In other words, the appeal is to the intellectual and emotional experience as the legitimate sources of knowledge, a claim that is also taken up by Humanistic Psychology. This means, among other things, that from this paradigm the subjective is not just a by-product of objective and easy to measure psychological processes, but an aspect as important as the rest.

Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical current that proposes a reflection on human existence itself. Two of its postulates that most influence Humanistic Psychology are the following:

In short, both phenomenology and existentialism emphasize consciousness and man's ability to decide, at all times, what to do, moved ultimately by his intentionality and not by his biology or environment, thus moving away from the innatism and environmentalism. Humanistic psychology picks up this heritage and orients it to the study and intervention on decision making, the capacity to create a consistent life project, human consciousness and reflection based on this experience, which is partly subjective.

In addition, as this current of psychologists assimilates ideas such as the existential searchtheir discourse often refers to the "potentialities"The nature of this development is not biological, but rather a process of development that is not Biological in nature. The nature of this development is not biological, but rather rather more ineffable: it is a progression of subjective states in which the person constantly wonders why what is happening to him/her, the meaning of what he/she is experiencing, and what he/she can do to improve his/her situation.

Bearing in mind that "what he is living" is something totally private and out of the reach of outsiders, it is understood that from a humanistic perspective this existential search is the responsibility of the subject who is experiencing it and that the psychologist has a secondary role as a facilitator of the process.Complicated, isn't it? Well, this is the animal in search of meaning that Humanistic Psychology faces.

Summarizing

Humanistic Psychology takes characteristics from existentialism and phenomenology and proposes a study of the human being as a conscious, intentional being, in constant development and whose mental representations and subjective states are a valid source of knowledge about himself. Furthermore, it understands that objectifiable behavior is caused by subjective mental processes, an aspect in which it differs radically from behaviorism.

A psychologist who adheres to this current will most probably deny that the study of thought has to start only from matter and experimentation, since this would imply an unacceptable dose of reductionism. Instead, it will surely emphasize the variability of human experiences and the importance of the social context in which we live. By bringing psychology closer to what has come to be known as the social sciencesit can be said that Humanistic Psychology accepts the connection between philosophy, moral theory, science and technology, and rejects the view of science as something neutral and detached from any ideological or political positioning.

A manifesto

Humanistic psychology can be understood as an inevitable fruit of the change of mentality brought about by the 20th century or, more specifically, a kind of psychology of postmodernity. psychology of postmodernity. It shares with postmodern philosophy the negation of a hegemonic discourse. hegemonic discourse (the materialistic approach proper to modern science) that pretends to explain all of reality, or at least those areas of reality on which it is worthwhile to train experts.

The science inherited from August Comte's positivism, point out the humanist psychologists, is useful for describing reality, but not for explaining it.. Human beings, contrary to what happens with scientific instruments, experience reality by giving it meaning, creating fictions and forms of narration that order the facts according to a series of beliefs and ideas, many of which are difficult to express verbally and impossible to measure. Therefore, a discipline that intends to study the way of thinking and experiencing of the human being will have to adapt its methodology and its contents to this "signifying" dimension of the human being. It must, in short, study and provide content about the existential search that characterizes us.

Several limitations of the humanistic model

From this "manifesto" of Humanistic Psychology its limitations are also born.

These psychologists face challenges that many other scientists renounce from the outset: on the one hand, the need to combine knowledge about the measurable aspects of human psychology with subjective phenomena, and on the other, the difficult mission of creating a solid theoretical corpus while renouncing the claim of universality of their explanations. The latter is important, since our subjective experiences are characterized by being linked to the culture we inhabit, but also to a lot of variables that make us unique. Perhaps that is why today it is practically impossible to talk about specific concrete models of the functioning of human thought sustained by Humanistic Psychology.

Each author of this current presents his own differentiated contents according to the idiosyncrasy of his thinking and the field he deals with and, in fact, it is difficult to know which psychologists fully embrace Humanistic Psychology and which are only partly influenced by it. While there are authors whose ideas recur in the literature of other psychologists, as is the case with Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogersthe proposals of other authors are more "isolated" or are too specific to be extrapolated to other fields.

The art of complicating life

Ultimately, if science is concerned with answering the question. "how?", the existential quest faced by Humanistic Psychology is made up of a multitude of much more complicated questions: "why?". Giving up nothing, in certain respects, is tantamount to complicating life; this search for meaning may indeed be a journey of no return, but the prospect of wandering eternally through the wastelands of existential doubt does not seem to daunt us.

In fact, we will sometimes march along its imaginary routes even if this may entail more problems than benefits from a purely economic and rational perspective, and even if Agrippa's trilemma keeps a close eye on us during this progression of questions and answers. Therefore, however debatable its contents may be from a scientific point of view (and, on some occasions, from one's own criteria), it is good to know of the existence of psychologists who have considered the need to complicate their lives in the same way as the people they intend to study and serve.

It may be that the people who belong to Humanistic Psychology lack the endorsement enjoyed by cognitive-behavioral psychology. cognitive-behavioral psychology or neurology. But they certainly cannot be accused of starting from an advantageous situation.

• The existence of the human being is changing and dynamic by its very nature, that is to say, it is developing.. Through the development of existence, concretized in its decision making, one reaches the essence, which can be authentic or inauthentic depending on its congruence with the life project of the person.
Bibliographical references:
• • Boeree, G. (2003). Theories of personality, by Abraham Maslow. Translation: Rafael Gautier.
  • Camino Roca, J. L. (2013). The Origins of Humanistic Psychology: Transactional Analysis in psychotherapy and education.. Madrid: CCS.
  • Heidegger, M. (1926). Being and Time. [Version by Escuela de Filosofía Universidad ARCIS]. Retrieved from http://espanol.free-ebooks.net/ebook/Ser-y-el-Tiem...
  • Maslow, A. H. (1982). The Creative Personality. Barcelona: Kairós.
  • Rosal Cortés, R. (1986). Personal growth (or self-realization): goal of humanistic psychotherapies. Anuario de psicología / The UB Journal of psychology. No.: 34.