Humanistic and Existential Theories Notes

Humanistic/Existential Theories

Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory

  • Overview
    • Maslow (1970) called his theory holistic-dynamic because:
      • It assumes the whole person is constantly motivated by one need or another.
      • People have the potential to grow toward psychological health, i.e., self-actualization.
    • To reach self-actualization, lower-level needs (hunger, safety, love, and esteem) must be satisfied.
    • Maslow later criticized psychoanalysis and behaviorism for their limited view of humanity and understanding of psychologically healthy individuals.
    • He believed humans have a higher nature and dedicated his later years to discovering the nature of psychologically healthy individuals.

Maslow’s View of Motivation

  • Holistic Approach:
    • The whole person, not a single part, is motivated (Maslow, 1970).
  • Complex Motivation:
    • Behavior can stem from multiple motives (e.g., sexual desire motivated by genital needs, dominance, companionship, love, and self-esteem).
  • Continuous Motivation:
    • People are continually motivated by one need or another.
    • Once a need is satisfied, it loses its motivational power and is replaced by another (e.g., hunger vs. safety, friendship, and self-worth).
  • Universal Needs:
    • All people are motivated by the same basic needs.
    • Expressions may vary across cultures (food, shelter, friendship), but the fundamental needs remain the same.
  • Hierarchy of Needs:
    • Needs are arranged in a hierarchy (Maslow, 1943, 1970).

Hierarchy of Needs

  • Concept:
    • Lower-level needs must be satisfied before higher-level needs become motivators.
    • Esteem or self-actualization are pursued after satisfying food and safety needs.
    • Hunger and safety have prepotency over esteem and self-actualization.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (original five-stage model)

  • Biological and Physiological needs:
    • Basic life needs: air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
  • Safety needs:
    • Protection, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.
  • Belongingness and Love needs:
    • Family, affection, relationships, work group, etc.
  • Esteem needs:
    • Achievement, status, responsibility, reputation.
  • Self-actualisation:
    • Personal growth and fulfilment.

Physiological Needs

  • Definition:
    • Most basic needs: food, water, oxygen, body temperature maintenance, etc.
      • They are the most prepotent of all needs.
  • Two Important Differences:
    • Complete or Overly Satisfied:
      • They are the only needs that can be completely satisfied.
      • Food can lose motivational power when one is full.
    • Recurring Nature:
      • Other level needs do not constantly recur.
      • Those who have partially satisfied love and esteem needs remain confident in their ability to continue doing so.

Safety Needs

  • Definition:
    • Differ from physiological needs; they cannot be overly satiated.
      • People can never be completely protected from all potential dangers.

Love and Belongingness Needs

  • Definition:
    • Desire for friendship, a mate, children, belonging to a family, club, neighborhood, or nation.
    • Includes aspects of sex and human contact, as well as giving and receiving love (Maslow, 1970).
  • Three Categories of People:
    • Adequately Satisfied:
      • Do not panic when denied love, confident in their acceptance by important people.
    • Never Experienced Love:
      • Incapable of giving love, may devalue love and take its absence for granted.
    • Received Love Sparingly:
      • Strongly motivated to seek love, have stronger needs for affection and acceptance compared to those who have received healthy amounts or no love at all (Maslow, 1970).

Esteem Needs

  • Definition:
    • Include self-respect, confidence, competence, and recognition from others.
    • Two levels (Maslow, 1970):
      • Reputation: Perception of prestige, recognition, or fame achieved in the eyes of others.
      • Self-Esteem: A person’s own feelings of worth and confidence.
    • Self-esteem is based on real competence, not just others’ opinions.
    • Meeting esteem needs places individuals on the threshold of self-actualization.

Adapted 8 level Hierarchy of Needs diagram, based on Maslow's theory

  • Biological and Physiological needs
    • basic life needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
  • Safety needs
    • protection, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc
  • Aesthetic needs
    • beauty, balance, form, etc
  • Cognitive needs
    • knowledge, meaning, self-awareness
  • Esteem needs
    • achievement, status, responsibility, reputation
  • Belongingness and Love needs
    • family, affection, relationships, work group, etc
  • Self-actualisation
    • personal growth, self-fulfilment
  • Transcendence
    • helping others to self-actualise

Self-Actualization Needs

  • Definition:
    • Include self-fulfillment, realization of potential, and creativity (Maslow, 1970).
    • Those who respect values like truth, beauty, and justice (B-values) become self-actualizing after esteem needs are met.
    • Those who do not embrace these values may face frustration in self-actualization despite satisfying other basic needs.
    • Self-actualizing people maintain self-esteem even when scorned or rejected.
    • They become independent of lower-level needs.

Aesthetic Needs

  • Definition:
    • Not universal, but some people in every culture are motivated by beauty and aesthetically pleasing experiences (Maslow, 1967).
    • Those with strong aesthetic needs desire beautiful and orderly surroundings.
    • When these needs are unmet, they may become ill physically and spiritually (Maslow, 1970).

Cognitive Needs

  • Definition:
    • Desire to know, solve mysteries, understand, and be curious (Maslow, 1970).
  • Impact:
    • When blocked, all needs on Maslow’s hierarchy are threatened; knowledge is necessary to satisfy each of the five conative needs.
    • Healthy people desire to know more, theorize, test hypotheses, and uncover mysteries for the satisfaction of knowing (Maslow, 1968b, 1970).
    • Those who have not satisfied cognitive needs may become pathological, displaying skepticism, disillusionment, and cynicism.

Neurotic Needs

  • Definition:
    • Satisfaction of conative, aesthetic, and cognitive needs is basic to physical and psychological health, and their frustration leads to some level of illness.
    • Neurotic needs lead only to stagnation and pathology (Maslow, 1970).
    • Neurotic needs are usually reactive and serve as compensation for unsatisfied basic needs (e.g., hoarding money due to unsatisfied safety needs).

Reversed Order of Needs

  • Creativity vs. Safety:
    • For some, creativity (a self-actualization need) may precede safety and physiological needs.
    • An artist may risk safety and health to complete an important work.
    • Such reversals are often more apparent than real.
    • Seemingly obvious deviations may not be variations at all if unconscious motivation is understood.

Unmotivated Behavior

  • Not all behavior is motivated.
    • Some behavior is caused by conditioned reflexes, maturation, or drugs.
    • Motivation is limited to striving for the satisfaction of some need.
    • Much of what Maslow (1970) called “expressive behavior” is unmotivated.

Expressive and Coping Behavior

  • Expressive Behavior:
    • Often an end in itself, unconscious, natural, and effortless.
    • Includes actions like slouching, looking stupid, being relaxed, showing anger, and expressing joy.
    • Can continue even without reinforcement or reward.
  • Coping Behavior:
    • Conscious, effortful, learned, and determined by the external environment.
    • Involves attempts to cope with the environment, secure food and shelter, make friends, and receive acceptance, appreciation, and prestige from others.

Self Actualization

  • Criteria for Self Actualization
    1. They were free from psychopathology.
    2. Self-actualizing people had progressed through the hierarchy of needs and therefore lived above the subsistence level of existence and had no ever present threat to their safety.
    3. Embracing of the Bvalues.
    4. Fulfilled their needs to grow, to develop, and to increasingly become what they were capable of becoming.

Values of Self-Actualizers

  • Truth
  • Goodness
  • Beauty
  • Wholeness or the transcendence of dichotomies
  • Aliveness or spontaneity, Uniqueness
  • Perfection
  • Completion
  • Justice and order
  • Simplicity
  • Richness or totality
  • Effortlessness
  • Playfulness or humor
  • Self-sufficiency or autonomy

Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People

  • More efficient perception of reality
  • Acceptance of self, others, and nature
  • Spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness
  • Problem-centering
  • The need for privacy
  • Autonomy
  • Continued freshness of appreciation
  • The peak experience
  • Gemeinschaftsgefuhl
  • Profound interpersonal relations
  • The democratic character structure
  • Discrimination between means and ends
  • Philosophical sense of humor
  • Creativeness
  • Resistance to enculturation

Love, Sex, and Self-Actualization

  • B-Love:
    • Self-actualizing people are capable of B-love, love for the essence or “Being” of the other.
    • Mutually felt and shared, not motivated by deficiency.
    • They love without expecting something in return.
    • Their love is never harmful; it is relaxed, open, and nonsecretive (Maslow, 1970).

The Jonah Complex

  • Definition:
    • Fear of being one’s best (Maslow, 1979).
    • Involves attempts to run away from one’s destiny, like the biblical Jonah.
    • Represents a fear of success and a feeling of awesomeness in the presence of beauty and perfection.

Rogers: Person-Centered Theory

Overview

  • Focus:
    • Rogers was more concerned with helping people grow than understanding their behaviors.
    • He emphasized the question, “How can I help this person grow and develop?”
  • Therapeutic Experience:
    • Rogers built his theory on his experiences as a therapist.
  • Distaste for Theory:
    • Despite formulating a rigorous theory, Rogers was uncomfortable with the notion of theory.

Person-Centered Theory

  • Approach:
    • Initially known as “nondirective,” later termed “client-centered,” “person-centered,” etc.
    • Client-centered refers to therapy; person-centered refers to Rogerian personality theory.
  • Framework:
    • Rogers’ theory closely aligns with an “if-then” framework.
      • Example: If the therapist is congruent and communicates unconditional positive regard and accurate empathy, then therapeutic change will occur.

Basic Assumptions

  • Formative Tendency:
    • Rogers (1978, 1980) believed that all matter evolves from simpler to more complex forms.
    • He called this process the formative tendency and cited examples from nature.
  • Actualizing Tendency:
    • Tendency within all humans (and other animals and plants) to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials (Rogers, 1959, 1980).
    • This is the only motive people possess.

Conditions for Growth

  • Relationship Requirements:
    • People must be in a relationship with a partner who is congruent (authentic) and demonstrates empathy and unconditional positive regard.
  • Effect of These Qualities:
    • These qualities permit individuals to actualize their innate tendency toward self-fulfillment (Rogers, 1961).

The Self and Self-Actualization

  • Development of Self:
    • Infants develop a concept of self when experience becomes personalized and differentiated in awareness as “I” or “me” experiences (Rogers, 1959).
  • Self-Actualization:
    • Evolves once infants establish a rudimentary self-structure.
    • It is a subset of the actualization tendency, not synonymous with it.
    • Actualization tendency = organismic experiences of the individual (conscious, unconscious, physiological, cognitive).
    • Self-actualization = tendency to actualize the self as perceived in awareness.
  • Harmony vs. Discrepancy:
    • When the organism and perceived self are in harmony, the two actualization tendencies are nearly identical.
    • When there is disharmony, conflict and inner tension results.
      • Example: Anger toward a spouse conflicting with one's self-perception.

The Self-Concept

  • Definition:
    • Includes all aspects of one’s being and experiences perceived in awareness (though not always accurately) by the individual.
    • Not identical with the organismic self.
    • Portions of the organismic self may be beyond awareness.
      • Example: The stomach is part of the organismic self but not the self-concept unless it malfunctions.

The Ideal Self

  • Definition:
    • One’s view of self as one wishes to be. Contains attributes one aspires to possess.
    • A wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept indicates incongruence and an unhealthy personality.
    • Psychologically healthy individuals perceive little discrepancy between their self-concept and what they ideally would like to be.

Awareness

  • Importance:
    • Without awareness, the self-concept and ideal self would not exist.
  • Definition:
    • Rogers (1959) defined awareness as “the symbolic representation (not necessarily in verbal symbols) of some portion of our experience”.

Levels of Awareness

  • Ignored or Denied:
    • Ignored Experience:
      • A woman walking down a busy street ignores many potential stimuli.
    • Denied Experience:
      • A mother who never wanted children becomes overly solicitous out of guilt, hiding her anger and resentment.
  • Accurately Symbolized and Freely Admitted:
    • Experiences are nonthreatening and consistent with the existing self-concept.
    • Example: A confident pianist receives praise from a friend.
  • Distorted:
    • Experience is reshaped to fit the existing self-concept when inconsistent.
    • Example: A pianist distrusts praise from a competitor.

Becoming a Person

  • Contact:
    • An individual must make contact with another person.
      • Positive regard is a prerequisite for positive self-regard.
    • Infants need contact from a caregiver to survive.
  • Positive Regard:
    • The person develops a need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person (Rogers, 1959).
  • Positive Self-Regard:
    • Experience of prizing or valuing oneself.
    • Once established, it becomes independent of the continual need to be loved.

Barriers to Psychological Health

  • Conditions of Worth:
    • Receiving conditional positive regard, meeting others’ expectations.
    • “A condition of worth arises when the positive regard of a significant other is conditional, when the individual feels that in some respects he [or she] is prized and in others not” (Rogers, 1959, p. 209).
  • External Evaluations:
    • Perceptions of others' views do not foster psychological health.
      • Prevent openness to own experiences.

Incongruence

  • Definition:
    • Psychological disequilibrium occurs when organismic experiences are not recognized as self-experiences.
    • Discrepancy between self-concept and organismic experience.
  • Vulnerability:
    • Greater incongruence leads to greater vulnerability.
    • People are vulnerable when unaware of the discrepancy between their organismic self and significant experience.
    • They may behave incomprehensibly to themselves and others.

Anxiety and Threat

  • Anxiety:
    • Evolves into threat as one becomes aware of incongruence.
    • Awareness that the self is no longer whole or congruent.
  • Signal for Change:
    • Anxiety and threat can signal the need for change, as it indicates an inconsistency between organismic experience and self-concept.

Defensiveness

  • Definition:
    • Protection of the self-concept against anxiety and threat by denial or distortion of experiences inconsistent with it (Rogers, 1959).
    • Distortion: Misinterpreting experience to fit the self-concept.
      • Perceiving the experience but failing to understand its true meaning.
    • Denial: Refusing to perceive an experience in awareness.
      • Keeping some aspect of it from reaching symbolization.

Disorganization

  • Definition:
    • Occurs when distortion and denial are insufficient to block out incongruence.
    • Behavior can align with organismic experience or shattered self-concept.
    • A man behaves in a confused, inconsistent, and unpredictable manner because his self-concept is no longer unified (gestalt).

May: Existential Psychology

Overview

  • Roots:
    • Rooted in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European philosophers.
  • Approach:
    • Rollo May’s approach was based on clinical experience, not scientific research.
    • He saw people as living in the present and responsible for who they become.
  • Courage:
    • Many people lack the courage to face their destiny, giving up their freedom and responsibility.

What is Extentialism?

  • Common Elements:
    • Existence Precedes Essence:
      • Existence means to emerge or become; essence implies a static substance.
    • Opposition to Subject-Object Split:
      • People are both subjective and objective and must search for truth by living active and authentic lives.
    • Search for Meaning:
      • People seek answers to questions about their being.
    • Responsibility:
      • Each person is responsible for who they are and what they become (Sartre).
    • Antitheoretical:
      • Theories dehumanize people and render them as objects.

Basic Concepts

  • Being-in-the World
    • Existentialists adopt a phenomenological approach to understanding humanity.
    • People exist in a world best understood from their own perspective.
    • The basic unity of person and environment is expressed in the German word Dasein (being-in-the-world).
    • Many people suffer from alienation, lacking unity of self and world, as they strive for power over nature and rely on industrial products.
    • Alienation includes being out of touch with one’s own body.

Alienation

  • Prevalence:
    • This feeling of isolation and alienation of self from the world is suffered not only by pathologically disturbed individuals but also by most individuals in modern societies.
  • Three Areas:
    • Separation from nature
      (1) separation from nature
    • Lack of meaningful interpersonal relations.
      (2) lack of meaningful interpersonal relations
    • Alienation from one’s authentic self.
      (3) alienation from one’s authentic self
  • Modes of Being-in-the-World:
    • People experience three simultaneous modes:
      • Umwelt: The environment around us.
      • Mitwelt: Our relations with other people.
      • Eigenwelt: Our relationship with our self.

Umwelt

  • Definition:
    • The world of objects and things that exists even without human awareness.
    • Includes nature, natural law, biological drives (hunger, sleep), and natural phenomena (birth, death).
  • Necessity:
    • Humans must learn to live in this world and adjust to changes within it.
    • Freud’s theory, with its emphasis on biology and instincts, deals mostly with Umwelt.

Mitwelt

  • Definition:
    • The world of interpersonal relationships and social interactions.
  • Contrast with Umwelt:
    • Sex vs. Love: Using another for gratification (Umwelt) vs. committing to the other person (Mitwelt).
  • Respect for Dasein:
    • Essential criterion is respecting the other person’s being-in-the-world (Dasein).
  • Focus of Theories:
    • Theories of Sullivan and Rogers emphasize interpersonal relations, dealing mostly with Mitwelt.

Eigenwelt

  • Definition:
    • One’s relationship with oneself.
    • Involves being aware of oneself as a human being and grasping one’s relationship to the world of things and people.
  • Exploration:
    • Includes self-reflection and understanding of personal experiences.
  • Questions:
    • What does this sunset mean to me? How is this other person a part of my life? What characteristics of mine allow me to love this person? How do I perceive this experience?

Nonbeing

  • Definition:
    • Being-in-the-world necessitates an awareness of self as a living, emerging being.
    • This awareness leads to the dread of not being: nonbeing or nothingness.
  • Confronting Nonbeing:
    • When we do not courageously confront our nonbeing by contemplating death, we will experience it in other forms.
  • Examples:
    • These forms include addiction, promiscuity, conformity, or generalized hostility.

Anxiety

  • Definition:
    • People experience anxiety when they become aware that their existence or some value might be destroyed (May, 1958a).
  • Sources:
    • Awareness of nonbeing or threat to essential values.
    • Confronting potential and freedom leads to anxiety.
  • Relation to Freedom:
    • Anxiety and freedom are intertwined.
    • Freedom cannot exist without anxiety, and vice versa.
  • Nature of Anxiety:
    • Can be pleasurable or painful, constructive or destructive, normal or neurotic.

Normal Anxiety

  • Definition:
    • Proportionate to the threat, does not involve repression, and can be confronted constructively on the conscious level (May, 1967).
    • Example: Scientists witnessing the first atomic bomb tests.

Neurotic Anxiety

  • Definition:
    • Disproportionate to the threat, involves repression, and is managed by blocking activity and awareness (May, 1967).
    • Normal anxiety is felt when values are threatened, while neurotic anxiety is experienced when values become dogma.

Guilt

  • Definition:
    • Arises when people deny their potentialities, fail to perceive the needs of others, or remain oblivious to their dependence on the natural world (May, 1958a).
  • Three Forms of Ontological Guilt:
    1. Separation Guilt:
      • Related to Umwelt.
      • Sense of alienation and separation from the natural world.
      • Common in “advanced societies”.
    2. Alienation from Others:
      • Associated with Mitwelt.
      • Failure to understand and meet others’ needs.
      • Seeing people only through one's own eyes, not theirs.
    3. Alienation from Self:
      • Associated with Eigenwelt.
      • Denial of one’s potentialities or failure to fulfill them.

Intentionality

  • Definition:
    • The structure that gives meaning to experience and allows people to make decisions about the future (May, 1969b).
    • Action and intentionality are inseparable.
  • Bridging Subject and Object:
    • Intentionality bridges the gap between subject and object.
    • It allows us to see and understand the objective world.
    • Example: A man observing a piece of paper can write, fold, or sketch, depending on his intentions.

Care, Love, and Will

  • Care:
    • Active process, the opposite of apathy.
    • “Care is a state in which something does matter” (May, 1969b, p. 289).
  • Love:
    • Defined as a “delight in the presence of the other person and an affirming of [that person’s] value and development as much as one’s own” (May, 1953, p. 206).
    • Without care, there can be no love.
  • Will:
    • “The capacity to organize one’s self so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place” (May, 1969b, p. 218).

Forms of Love

  • Sex:
    • Biological function satisfied through sexual intercourse or release.
  • Eros:
    • Psychological desire seeking procreation or creation through enduring union.
    • Making love vs. manipulating organs.

Philia

  • Definition:
    • Intimate nonsexual friendship that takes time to grow and develop.
    • Example: Love between siblings or lifelong friends.
  • Requirements:
    • Does not require doing anything except accepting, being with, and enjoying the beloved (May, 1969a, p. 31).

Agape

  • Definition:
    • Esteem for the other, concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain; disinterested love.
    • Typically, the love of God for man (May, 1969b, p. 319).

Freedom and Destiny

  • Freedom:
    • “The individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one” (May, 1967, p. 175).
    • Destiny includes death, gender, weaknesses, and early experiences.
    • Freedom entails being able to harbor different possibilities (May, 1981, pp. 10–11), leading to normal anxiety.

Forms of Freedom

  • Existential Freedom:
    • Freedom of action—the freedom of doing.
      • The freedom to act on the choices that one makes.
  • Essential Freedom:
    • Freedom of being.
      • Denial of existential freedom can facilitate essential freedom.