The humanistic approach revolves around the concept of free will. Free will in psychology is the view that humans can make their own choices and that humans are not determined by biological or external factors. Humans shoud be viewed holistically (as a whole)
Maslows - hierarchy of needs
At the top is ’self actualisation’ This is the desire to be the most that we can possibly be. This is going to be different for different people. However, basic needs must be met before ’self actualisation’ is attainable
Esteem. Esteem includes things such as: respect, self esteem, status and recognition. People often engage in a profession or a hobby to gain recognition. These activities give the person a sense of contribution or value. Low self esteem may result from imbalancs in this level.
Love and belonging - This includes things such as friendhship, intimacy and family. This need is especially strong in childhood.
Safety needs, this includes things like personal security, employment and resources
Physiological needs. This includes things such as air, breathing, food, water, clothing, shelter, sleep.
The ideal self and congruence
Rogers argues that for personal growth to be achieved, an individual's concept of self must have congruence with their ideal self. If too big of a gap is present between perceived self and ideal self, then the person is experiencing a period of self incongruence and self actualisation cannot be reached.
Perceived self - How an individual thinks of themselves
Ideal self - An individual's goal on how they want to be like. This is their target self which will help them reach self actualisation
Congruence - when our perceived self and ideal self align, we have achieved congruence
Incongruence - when the ideal self and perceived self do not align / when there is a considerable gap between perceived self and ideal self.
Client Centred Therapy (CCT)
Developed by Rogers, this aims to achieve congruence in a client, who takes an active role in the therapy. The cause of incongruence may have been a lack of unconditional positive regard from our parents. This means that the persons parents attached ‘conditions of worth’ to them and so setting conditions on their love. This then creates psychological probelms for the person. In the therapy, the therapist provides the clients with unconditional postive regard, along with empathy and genuineness, to try to reduce the incongruence between the client’s perceived self and ideal self.
Evaluation of CCT
Although CCT had changed how therapy was done in many ways, CCT is not likely to work on more serious mental conditions such as schizophrenia. The reason for thus is because mental disorders such as schizophrenia aren’t based on matters of self-worth and anxiety but instead being out of touch with reality and other issues within a persons mind that have no correlation to anxiety or self worth.
Evaluation of the Humanistic approach
1. Not reductionist - the humanistic approach rejects any attempts to to dissect how humans learn and process experience into smaller components. Whilst other approaches attempt to dissect how humans learn and process experience, the humansitic approach pushes holism, the idea that the human should be looked at as a whole. Therefore, this approach is likely to have higher validity than others.
2. Limited application - Humanistic psychology has relatively little real world application. It is true that Rogerian therapy had changed councelling techniques, however, the approach still has limited impact on psychology as a whole. This likely due to the fact that there is a lack of a scientific base.
3. Untestable concepts - The humanistic approach is not very scientifically rigorous, as concepts sucj as the ideal self and selfn actualisation are difficult to test and measure. This weakens the approach because it lacks scientific credibility. \n