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What Is Humanistic Psychology?

A Psychology Perspective Influenced By Humanism

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

 James Lacy, MLS, is a fact-checker and researcher.

Other Types of Humanism

• How to Use It

Potential Pitfalls

Humanistic psychology is a perspective that emphasizes looking at the whole individual and stresses concepts such as free will, self-efficacy, and self-actualization. Rather than concentrating on dysfunction, humanistic psychology strives to help people fulfill their potential and maximize their well-being.

This area of psychology emerged during the 1950s as a reaction to psychoanalysis and behaviorism, which had dominated psychology during the first half of the century.  Psychoanalysis was focused on understanding the unconscious motivations that drive behavior while behaviorism studied the conditioning processes that produce behavior.

Humanist thinkers felt that both psychoanalysis and behaviorism were too pessimistic, either focusing on the most tragic of emotions or failing to take into account the role of personal choice.

However, it is not necessary to think of these three  schools of thought  as competing elements. Each  branch of psychology  has contributed to our understanding of the human mind and behavior.

Humanistic psychology added yet another dimension that takes a more holistic view of the individual.

Humanism is a philosophy that stresses the importance of human factors rather than looking at religious, divine, or spiritual matters. Humanism is rooted in the idea that people have an ethical responsibility to lead lives that are personally fulfilling while at the same time contributing to the greater good of all people.

Humanism stresses the importance of human values and dignity. It proposes that people can resolve problems through science and reason. Rather than looking to religious traditions, humanism focuses on helping people live well, achieve personal growth, and make the world a better place.

The term "humanism" is often used more broadly, but it also has significance in a number of different fields, including psychology.

Religious Humanism

Some religious traditions incorporate elements of humanism as part of their belief systems. Examples of religious humanism include Quakers, Lutherans, and Unitarian Universalists. 

Secular Humanism

Secular humanism rejects all religious beliefs, including the existence of the supernatural. This approach stresses the importance of logic, the scientific method, and rationality when it comes to understanding the world and solving human problems. 

Uses for Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic psychology focuses on each individual's potential and stresses the importance of growth and self-actualization . The fundamental belief of humanistic psychology is that people are innately good and that mental and social problems result from deviations from this natural tendency.

Humanistic psychology also suggests that people possess personal agency and that they are motivated to use this free will to pursue things that will help them achieve their full potential as human beings.

The need for fulfillment and personal growth is a key motivator of all behavior. People are continually looking for new ways to grow, to become better, to learn new things, and to experience psychological growth and self-actualization.

Some of the ways that humanistic psychology is applied within the field of psychology include:

• Humanistic therapy : Several different types of psychotherapy have emerged that are rooted in the principles of humanism. These include client-centered therapy, existential therapy, and Gestalt therapy . 
• Personal development : Because humanism stresses the importance of self-actualization and reaching one's full potential, it can be used as a tool of self-discovery and personal development.
• Social change : Another important aspect of humanism is improving communities and societies. For individuals to be healthy and whole, it is important to develop societies that foster personal well-being and provide social support.

Impact of Humanistic Psychology

The humanist movement had an enormous influence on the course of psychology and contributed new ways of thinking about mental health. It offered a new approach to understanding human behaviors and motivations and led to the development of new techniques and approaches to psychotherapy .

Some of the major ideas and concepts that emerged as a result of the humanistic psychology movement include an emphasis on things such as:

• Client-centered therapy
• Fully functioning person
• Hierarchy of needs
• Peak experiences
• Self-actualization
• Self-concept
• Unconditional positive regard

How to Apply Humanistic Psychology

Some tips from humanistic psychology that can help people pursue their own fulfillment and actualization include:

• Discover your own strengths
• Develop a vision for what you want to achieve
• Consider your own beliefs and values
• Pursue experiences that bring you joy and develop your skills
• Learn to accept yourself and others
• Focus on enjoying experiences rather than just achieving goals
• Keep learning new things
• Pursue things that you are passionate about
• Maintain an optimistic outlook

One of the major strengths of humanistic psychology is that it emphasizes the role of the individual. This school of psychology gives people more credit for controlling and determining their state of mental health.

It also takes environmental influences into account. Rather than focusing solely on our internal thoughts and desires, humanistic psychology also credits the environment's influence on our experiences.

Humanistic psychology helped remove some of the stigma attached to therapy and made it more acceptable for normal, healthy individuals to explore their abilities and potential through therapy.

While humanistic psychology continues to influence therapy, education, healthcare, and other areas, it has not been without some criticism.

For example, the humanist approach is often seen as too subjective. The importance of individual experience makes it difficult to objectively study and measure humanistic phenomena. How can we objectively tell if someone is self-actualized? The answer, of course, is that we cannot. We can only rely upon the individual's assessment of their experience.

Another major criticism is that observations are unverifiable; there is no accurate way to measure or quantify these qualities. This can make it more difficult to conduct research and design assessments to measure hard-to-measure concepts.

History of Humanistic Psychology

The early development of humanistic psychology was heavily influenced by the works of a few key theorists, especially Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. Other prominent humanist thinkers included Rollo May and Erich Fromm.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow described his hierarchy of needs in "A Theory of Human Motivation" published in  Psychological Review.   Later during the late 1950s, Abraham Maslow and other psychologists held meetings to discuss developing a professional organization devoted to a more humanist approach to psychology.

They agreed that topics such as self-actualization, creativity, individuality, and related topics were the central themes of this new approach. In 1951, Carl Rogers published "Client-Centered Therapy," which described his humanistic, client-directed approach to therapy. In 1961, the  Journal of Humanistic Psychology  was established.

It was also in 1961 that the  American Association for Humanistic Psychology  was formed and by 1971, humanistic psychology become an APA division. In 1962, Maslow published "Toward a Psychology of Being," in which he described humanistic psychology as the "third force" in psychology. The first and second forces were behaviorism and psychoanalysis respectively.

A Word From Verywell

Today, the concepts central to humanistic psychology can be seen in many disciplines including other branches of psychology, education, therapy, political movements, and other areas. For example, transpersonal psychology and positive psychology both draw heavily on humanist influences.

The goals of humanism remain as relevant today as they were in the 1940s and 1950s and humanistic psychology continues to empower individuals, enhance well-being, push people toward fulfilling their potential, and improve communities all over the world.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

A Humanistic Approach to Mental Health Assessment, Evaluation, and Measurement-Based Care

• First Online: 13 July 2022

Cite this chapter

• William E. Hanson 7 ,
• Hansen Zhou 8 ,
• Diana L. Armstrong 9 &
• Noëlle T. Liwski 10  

Part of the book series: The Springer Series on Human Exceptionality ((SSHE))

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Mental health assessment and evaluation models have waxed and waned over the years. However, a contemporary humanistic approach, Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment (C/TA), holds considerable promise and staying power. When combined with Measurement-Based Care (MBC), therapeutic processes and outcomes are enhanced. This chapter focuses on the integration of C/TA and MBC into clinical practice. It includes relevant theory and research, real-life applications and examples, and answers fundamental questions, like “Can mental health assessment and testing actually be collaborative and humanistic in nature?” and “As clinicians, why should we care about measuring clients’ treatment progress?” At the end of the chapter, illustrative graphs and verbatim scripts are provided for clinical use.

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Psychometrically sound measures also exist regarding clinicians’ attitudes toward MBC, including the Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale-Routine Outcome Monitoring (Rye et al., 2019 ) and the Monitoring Feedback Attitude Scale (Jensen-Doss et al., 2018 ).

“Alex” is a pseudonym. Although she is an actual former client—and all process-outcome data are real—potentially identifying information was changed significantly to preserve anonymity and client confidentiality. Alex gave permission to be included in this case study for illustrative purposes.

The authors thank Aida Javaheri, a doctoral student in Concordia University of Edmonton’s PsyD program, for helping reconcile references and in-text citations

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Hanson, W.E., Zhou, H., Armstrong, D.L., Liwski, N.T. (2022). A Humanistic Approach to Mental Health Assessment, Evaluation, and Measurement-Based Care. In: Andrews, J.J., Shaw, S.R., Domene, J.F., McMorris, C. (eds) Mental Health Assessment, Prevention, and Intervention. The Springer Series on Human Exceptionality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97208-0_17

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Humanistic Psychology’s Approach to Wellbeing: 3 Theories

That sounds quite nice, doesn’t it? Let’s repeat that again.

Humans are innately good.

Driving forces, such as morality, ethical values, and good intentions, influence behavior, while deviations from natural tendencies may result from adverse social or psychological experiences, according to the premise of humanistic psychology.

What does it mean to flourish as a human being? Why is it important to achieve self-actualization? And what is humanistic psychology, anyway?

Humanistic psychology has the power to provide individuals with self-actualization, dignity, and worth. Let’s see how that works in this article.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Meaning and Valued Living Exercises for free . These creative, science-based exercises will help you learn more about your values, motivations, and goals and will give you the tools to inspire a sense of meaning in the lives of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

What is the humanistic psychology approach, brief history of humanistic psychology, 10 real-life examples in therapy & education, popular humanistic theories of wellbeing, humanistic psychology and positive psychology, 4 techniques for humanistic therapists, 4 common criticisms of humanistic psychology, fascinating books on the topic, more resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Humanistic psychology is a holistic approach in psychology that focuses on the whole person. Humanists believe that a person is “in the process of becoming,” which places the conscious human experience as the nucleus of psychological establishment.

Humanistic psychology was developed to address the deficiencies of psychoanalysis , psychodynamic theory , and behaviorism . The foundation for this movement is understanding behavior by means of human experience.

This entity of psychology takes a phenomenological stance, where personality is studied from an individual’s subjective point of view.

Key focus of humanistic psychology

The tenets of humanistic psychology, which are also shared at their most basic level with transpersonal and existential psychology, include:

• Humans cannot be viewed as the sum of their parts or reduced to functions/parts.
• Humans exist in a unique human context and cosmic ecology.
• Human beings are conscious and are aware of their awareness.
• Humans have a responsibility because of their ability to choose.
• Humans search for meaning, value, and creativity besides aiming for goals and being intentional in causing future events (Aanstoos et al., 2000).

In sum, the focus of humanistic psychology is on the person and their search for self-actualization .

At this time, humanistic psychology was considered the third force in academic psychology and viewed as the guide for the human potential movement (Taylor, 1999).

The separation of humanistic psychology as its own category was known as Division 32. Division 32 was led by Amedeo Giorgi, who “criticized experimental psychology’s reductionism, and argued for a phenomenologically based methodology that could support a more authentically human science of psychology” (Aanstoos et al., 2000, p. 6).

The Humanistic Psychology Division (32) of the American Psychological Association was founded in September 1971 (Khan & Jahan, 2012). Humanistic psychology had not fully emerged until after the radical behaviorism era; however, we can trace its roots back to the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

Husserl spurred the phenomenological movement and suggested that theoretical assumptions be set aside, and philosophers and scientists should instead describe immediate experiences of phenomena (Schneider et al., 2015).

Who founded humanistic psychology?

The first phase of humanistic psychology, which covered the period between 1960 to 1980, was largely driven by Maslow’s agenda for positive psychology . It articulated a view of the human being as irreducible to parts, needing connection, meaning, and creativity (Khan & Jahan, 2012).

The original theorists of humanistic theories included Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May, who postulated that behaviorism and psychoanalysis were inadequate in explaining human nature (Schneider et al., 2015).

Prior to these researchers, Allport, Murray, and Murphy had protested the reductionist movement, including the white laboratory rat as a method for comparing human behavior (Schneider et al., 2015). Influential women in the development of this branch of psychology included Frieden and Criswell (Serlin & Criswell, 2014).

Carl Rogers’s work

Carl Rogers developed the concept of client-centered therapy , which has been widely used for over 40 years (Carter, 2013). This type of therapy encourages the patient toward self-actualization through acceptance and empathetic listening by the therapist. This perspective asserts that a person is fully developed if their self is aligned with their organism (Robbins, 2008).

In other words, a fully functioning person is someone who is self-actualized. This concept is important, as it presents the need for therapy as a total experience.

Rogers’s contribution assisted the effectiveness of person-centered therapy through his facilitation of clients reaching self-actualization and fully functional living. In doing so, Rogers focused on presence, congruence, and acceptance by the therapist (Aanstoos et al., 2000).

The Humanistic Theory by Carl Rogers – Mister Simplify

The human mind is not just reactive; it is reflective, creative, generative, and proactive (Bandura, 2001). With this being said, humanistic psychology has made major impacts in therapeutic and educational settings.

Humanistic psychology in therapy

The humanistic, holistic perspective on psychological development and self-actualization provides the foundation for individual and family counseling (Khan & Jahan, 2012). Humanistic therapies are beneficial because they are longer, place more focus on the client, and focus on the present (Waterman, 2013).

Maslow and Rogers were at the forefront of delivering client-centered therapy as they differentiated between self-concept as understanding oneself, society’s perception of themselves, and actual self. This humanistic psychological approach provides another method for psychological healing and is viewed as a more positive form of psychology. Rogers “emphasized the personality’s innate drive toward achieving its full potential” (McDonald & Wearing, 2013, p. 42–43).

Other types of humanistic-based therapies include:

• Logotherapy is a therapeutic approach aimed at helping individuals find the meaning of life. This technique was created by Victor Frankl, who posited that to live a meaningful life, humans need a reason to live (Melton & Schulenberg, 2008).
• Gestalt Therapy’s primary aim is to restore the wholeness of the experience of the person, which may include bodily feelings, movements, emotions, and the ability to creatively adjust to environmental conditions. This type of therapy is tasked with providing the client with awareness and awareness tools (Yontef & Jacobs, 2005). This includes the use of re-enactments and role-play by empowering awareness in the present moment.
• Existential Therapy aims to aid clients in accepting and overcoming the existential fears inherent in being human. Clients are guided in learning to take responsibility for their own choices. Rather than explaining the human predicament, existential therapy techniques involve exploring and describing the conflict.
• Narrative Therapy is goal directed, with change being achieved by exploring how language is used to construct and maintain problems. The method involves the client’s narrative interpretation of their experience in the world (Etchison & Kleist, 2000).

Humanistic psychology has developed a variety of research methodologies and practice models focused on facilitating the development and transformation of individuals, groups, and organizations (Resnick et al., 2001).

The methodologies include narrative, imaginal, and somatic approaches. The practices range from personal coaching and organizational consulting through creative art therapies to philosophy (Resnick et al., 2001).

Humanistic approach in education

The thoughts of Dewey and Bruner regarding the humanistic movement and education greatly affect education today. Dewey proclaimed that schools should influence social outcomes by teaching life skills in a meaningful way (Starcher & Allen, 2016).

Bruner was an enthusiast of constructivist learning and believed in making learners autonomous by using methods such as scaffolding and discovery learning (Starcher & Allen, 2016).

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Resnick et al., 2001) asserts that there are eight different types of intelligence: linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. In education, it is important for educators to address as many of these areas as possible.

These psychologists soon set the tone for a more intense focus on humanistic skills, such as self-awareness, communication, leadership ability, and professionalism. Humanistic psychology impacts the educational system with its perspectives on self-esteem and self-help (Khan & Jahan, 2012; Resnick et al., 2001).

Maslow extended this outlook with his character learning (Starcher & Allen, 2016). Character learning is a means for obtaining good habits and creating a moral compass. Teaching young children morality is paramount in life (Birhan et al., 2021).

In concentrating on these aspects, the focus is placed on the future, self-improvement, and positive change. Humanistic psychology rightfully provides individuals with self-actualization, dignity, and worth.

Silvan Tomkins theorized the script theory, which led to the advancement of personality psychology  and opened the door to many narrative-based theories involving myths, plots, episodes, character, voices, dialogue, and life stories (McAdams, 2001).

Tomkins’s affect theory followed this theory and explains human behavior as falling into scripts or patterns. It appears as though this theory’s acceptance led to many more elements of experience being considered (McAdams, 2001).

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs has contributed much to humanistic psychology and impacts mental and physical health . This pyramid is frequently used within the educational system, specifically for classroom management purposes. In the 1960s and 1970s, this model was expanded to include cognitive, aesthetic, and transcendence needs (McLeod, 2017).

Maslow’s focus on what goes right with people as opposed to what goes wrong with them and his positive accounts of human behavior benefit all areas of psychology.

Download 3 Meaning & Valued Living Exercises (PDF)

These detailed, science-based exercises will equip you or your clients with tools to find meaning in life help and pursue directions that are in alignment with values.

Download 3 Free Meaning Tools Pack (PDF)

By filling out your name and email address below.

Although humanistic psychology and positive psychology share the basic ideas of psychological wellbeing – the intent to achieve individual human potential and a humanistic framework – their origins are quite different (Medlock, 2012). Humanistic psychology adds two important elements to the establishment of positive psychology: epistemology and its audience (Taylor, 2001).

Humanistic psychology and positive psychology share many overlapping thematic contents and theoretical presuppositions (Robbins, 2008).

Much of the work in positive psychology was developed from the work in humanistic psychology (Medlock, 2012). Positive psychology was also first conceived by Maslow in 1954 and then further discussed in an article by Martin Seligman (Shourie & Kaur, 2016).

Seligman’s purpose for positive psychology was to focus on the characteristics that make life worth living as opposed to only studying the negatives, such as mental illness (Shrestha, 2016).

Congruence refers to both the intra- and interpersonal characteristics of the therapist (Kolden et al., 2011).

This requires the therapist to bring a mindful genuineness and conscientiously share their experience with the client.

Active listening

Active listening helps to foster a supportive environment. For example, response tokens such as “uh-huh” and “mm-hmm” are effective ways to prompt the client to continue their dialogue (Fitzgerald & Leudar, 2010).

Looking at the client, nodding occasionally, using facial expressions, being aware of posture, paraphrasing, and asking questions are also ways to maintain active listening.

Reflective understanding

Similar to active listening, reflective understanding includes restating and clarifying what the client is saying. This technique is important, as it draws the client’s awareness to their emotions, allowing them to label. Employing Socratic questioning would ensure a reflective understanding in your practice (Bennett-Levy et al., 2009).

Unconditional positive regard

Unconditional positive regard considers the therapist’s attitude toward the patient. The therapist’s enduring warmth and consistent acceptance shows their value for humanity and, more specifically, their client.

Some may assert that humanistic psychology is not exclusively defined by the senses or intellect (Taylor, 2001).

Humanistic psychology was also once thought of as a touchy-feely type of psychology. Instead, internal dimensions such as self-knowledge, intuition, insight, interpreting one’s dreams, and the use of guided mental imagery are considered narcissistic by critics of humanistic psychology (Robbins, 2008; Taylor, 2001).

Further, studying internal conditions, such as motives or traits, was frowned upon at one time (Polkinghorne, 1992).

Aanstoos et al. (2000) note Skinner’s thoughts concerning humanistic psychology as being the number one barrier in psychology’s stray from a purely behavioral science. Religious fundamentalists were also opposed to this new division and referred to people of humanistic psychology as secular humanists.

Humanistic psychology is sometimes difficult to assess and has even been charged as being poor empirical science (DeRobertis, 2021). That is because of the uncommon belief that the outcome should be driven more by the participants rather than the researchers (DeRobertis & Bland, 2021).

If you find this topic intriguing and want to find out even more, then take a look at the following books.

1. Becoming an Existential-Humanistic Therapist: Narratives From the Journey – Julia Falk and Louis Hoffman

If you’re interested in becoming an existential-humanistic psychologist or counselor, you may want to refer to this collection of therapists and counselors who have already made this journey.

Perhaps you are a student who is considering pursuing this direction in psychology.

Regardless, this book contains reflective exercises for individuals considering pursuing a career as an existential-humanistic counselor or therapist, as well as exercises for current therapists to reflect on their own journey.

Find the book on Amazon .

2. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy – Carl Rogers

If your intent is to explore client-centered therapy more in depth, you may want to pick up this book by one of humanistic psychology’s founders.

In this text, Rogers sheds light on this important therapeutic encounter and human potential.

3. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl

Also by one of humanistic psychology’s founders, Man’s Search for Meaning provides an explanation of Logotherapy.

With his actual horrific experiences in Nazi concentration camps, Frankl declares that humans’ primary drive in life is not pleasure, but the discovery and pursuit of what they personally find meaningful.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of humanistic psychology, our article The Five Founding Fathers and a History of Positive Psychology would be an excellent reference, as the roots of humanistic and positive psychology are entangled.

In humanistic psychology, self-awareness and introspection are important. Try using our Self-Awareness Worksheet for Adults to learn more about yourself and increase your self-knowledge.

Journaling is an effective way to boost your internal self-awareness. Try using this Gratitude Journal and Who Am I? worksheet as starting points.

Perhaps you would benefit from our science and research-driven 17 Meaning & Valued Living Exercises . Use them to help others choose directions for their lives in alignment with what is truly important to them.

17 Tools To Encourage Meaningful, Value-Aligned Living

This 17 Meaning & Valued Living Exercises [PDF] pack contains our best exercises for helping others discover their purpose and live more fulfilling, value-aligned lives.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Humanistic psychology is a total package because it encompasses legends of the field, empirical research, strong philosophical foundations, and arts and literature connections (Bargdill, 2011).

Some may refute this statement, but prior to humanistic psychology, there was not an effective method for truly understanding humanistic issues without deviating from traditional psychological science (Kriz & Langle, 2012).

Humanistic psychology offers a different approach that can be used to positively impact your therapeutic practice or enhance your classroom practice. We hope you find these theories and techniques helpful in facilitating self-actualization, dignity, and worth in your clients and students.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Meaning and Valued Living Exercises for free .

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How Humanistic Is Positive Psychology? Lessons in Positive Psychology From Carl Rogers' Person-Centered Approach—It's the Social Environment That Must Change

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The original contributions generated for the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

Both positive psychology and the person-centered approach share a common aim to promote human flourishing. In this article I will discuss how the person-centered approach is a form of positive psychology, but positive psychology is not necessarily person-centered. I will show how the person-centered approach offers a distinctive view of human nature that leads the person-centered psychologist to understand that if people are to change, it is not the person that we must try to change but their social environment. Centrally, the paper suggests that respecting the humanistic image of the human being and, consequently, influencing people's social environment to facilitate personal growth would mean a step forward for positive psychology and would promote cross-fertilization between positive psychology and the person-centered approach instead of widening their gap.

Introduction

It was in the late 1980's that I first became interested in what later became known as positive psychology. I was completing my doctorate research in the psychology of trauma. An unexpected finding was that many survivors reported positive changes in outlook. But there was little written in the mainstream literature about this. I wanted to find a language with which to frame my observations. Like many, I had studied humanistic psychology briefly in my undergraduate studies, but not in a way that I understood its depth and richness, so it came as a revelation to me when I discovered that the same intellectual challenges I was now grappling with, had been tackled decades ago.

Specifically, I began to see how Carl Rogers' person-centered theory of personality development could be applied to understanding how people grow following adversity. Throughout the 1990's, I studied Rogers' ideas coming to realize that what he and his colleagues had achieved from the 1950's onwards had offered a new paradigm for the psychological sciences, one that focused on how to promote human flourishing. As a result, when I first encountered positive psychology in the early 2000's, my initial reaction was to dismiss it as it seemed to offer nothing new, but I also saw the enthusiasm of my students for positive psychology, and that positive psychology was succeeding in bringing ideas about well-being back into mainstream awareness when person-centered psychology seemed to be struggling to do so. I could see that person-centered psychology was not incompatible with being interested in positive psychology, so I began to think of myself as a person-centered positive psychologist. For the past two decades I have sought to build bridges between humanistic and positive psychology, to bring the person-centered approach to my work on posttraumatic growth and authenticity, and to make the case that the person-centered approach is a form of positive psychology.

In this article I want to elaborate on what I mean when I say that the person-centered approach is a form of positive psychology. My aim is to position the person-centered approach as part of contemporary positive psychology, as well as it being part of the humanistic psychology tradition. Carl Rogers, the founder of the person-centered approach, was one of the pioneers of humanistic psychology. As such, the person-centered approach is often associated with humanistic psychology. While the relationship between humanistic and positive psychology has been contentious in the past, it is now widely accepted that positive psychology has largely followed in the footsteps of humanistic psychology. In this way, person-centered psychology can be seen as a historical antecedent to positive psychology, but what I want to show is that it is not just a branch of research, scholarship, and practice from the past; it is one that has continued and developed over the past 70 years, that now sits comfortably under the wider umbrella of positive psychology.

I would like to invite readers of this special issue to become more fully acquainted with person-centered psychology and to consider its perspective on what it means to be a positive psychologist. I will provide a brief overview of positive psychology in the context of humanistic psychology, followed by a discussion of the person-centered approach and how it offers a distinctive view of human nature, and finally, reflections on my vision for a more person-centered positive psychology. In short, the person-centered positive psychologist would look not at ways to change people but at how to change their social environment. I will show that considering the influence of the social environment as the means to facilitate personal growth would mean a step forward for positive psychology in a direction away from its individualistic and medicalized focus and would promote cross-fertilization between positive psychology and humanistic psychology. In making this argument I am reiterating and developing Linley and Joseph's ( 2004b ) conclusion in their book Positive Psychology in Practice that there is a need to develop a theoretical foundation for positive psychology that offers a clear, coherent, and consistent vision of human nature, and how the agenda for the practice of positive psychology inevitably arises out of its vision. Speaking personally, my vision would be for a more person-centered positive psychology.

Positive Psychology in the Context of Humanistic Psychology

Positive psychology was formally launched by Martin Seligman in his 1998 presidential address to the American Psychological Association (Seligman, 1999 ), and in the special issue of the American Psychologist dedicated to the topic that soon followed (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000 ). Seligman later said how the idea of positive psychology came to him following a moment of epiphany when gardening with his daughter, Nikki, who was then aged five, when she instructed him not to be such a grouch. “In that moment, I acquired the mission of helping to build the scientific infrastructure of a field that would investigate what makes life worth living: positive emotion, positive character and positive institutions.” (Seligman, 2004 , p. xi). But while such thinking was a refreshing change for many, these were not new ideas. The idea of focusing on the positive was an idea that was always core to humanistic psychology.

The A merican Association for Humanistic Psychology was founded by Abraham Maslow in 1961 (renamed the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1963). Bugental ( 1964 ) put forward five basic principles of humanistic psychology, which were later adapted by Tom Greening to define the parameters of humanistic psychology: “1. Human beings, as human, supersede the sum of their parts. They cannot be reduced to components. 2. Human beings have their existence in a uniquely human context, as well as in a cosmic ecology. 3. Human beings are aware and aware of being aware —i.e., they are conscious. Human consciousness always includes an awareness of oneself in the context of other people. 4. Human beings have some choice and, with that, responsibility. 5. Human beings are intentional, aim at goals, are aware that they cause future events, and seek meaning, value, and creativity.” Humanistic psychology was known as the third force of psychology, because it recognized the limitations of its predecessors, behavioral psychology and psychoanalytical psychology. As Sutich and Vich ( 1969 ), editors of Readings in Humanistic Psychology , wrote:

“Two main branches of psychology – behaviorism and psychoanalysis- appear to have made great contributions to human knowledge, but neither singly nor together have they covered the almost limitless scope of human behavior, relationships, and possibilities. Perhaps their greatest limitation has been the inadequacy of their approach to positive human potentialities and the maximal realization of those potentialities” (Sutich and Vich, 1969 , p. 1).

Focusing on the potentialities of being human was always a feature of humanistic psychology. For the first decade of its existence, humanistic psychology went from strength to strength (Moss, 2001 ). It sought to understand the nature of humanity and the problems faced in the quest to live harmoniously and peacefully together and within nature. But by the 1980's, however, the influence of humanistic psychology had begun to dwindle (Taylor and Martin, 2001 ). Was humanistic psychology simply ahead of its time? Had it pushed forward its more radical ideas about qualitative ways of knowing too quickly? Did becoming associated with the counterculture lose it credibility?

It seems likely that humanistic psychology lost its power and influence, not only for these reasons, but because it was “…inherently incompatible with the basic assumptions and values of contemporary mainstream psychology and with the conservative ideologies that have increasingly gained power in American culture since the 1960s” (Elkins, 2009 , p. 267). By the late 1990's, humanistic psychology was largely seen as obsolete, irrelevant, and lacking in rigor by mainstream scholars (Krippner, 2001 ).

So it was that when positive psychology was introduced, it seemed that the ideas long championed by humanistic psychologists were now being put forward again, but it was done so in a way that was critical of humanistic psychology for what was perceived to be its anti-scientific stance, and paid scant acknowledgment to its achievements (Robbins, 2008 , 2015 ). In 2001, in response, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology had a special issue containing several articles dedicated to what had become a fraught relationship between humanistic and positive psychology. Greening ( 2001 ), the then editor, opened by remarking how positive psychology had appeared as if humanistic psychology, its decades of scholarship and research, and the fact that early pioneers of humanistic psychology had themselves been presidents of the American Psychological Association, had simply not existed. Taylor ( 2001 ), in his article in the special issue, refuted Seligman's arguments that humanistic psychology was anti-scientific and that it had not generated significant research. It was also argued that positive psychology would gain from recognizing the merits of experiential, process-oriented research methodologies common to the humanistic psychotherapies (Resnick et al., 2001 ).

Certainly, it is clear that some of the initial comments by positive psychologists in the early days were unjustified. That said, perhaps there was also some truth in positive psychology's initial negative portrayal of humanistic psychology as it had later become. Certainly, there were aspects of the 1960's counterculture that were questionable and did no favors to humanistic psychology's standing in the eyes of mainstream psychology by becoming so closely aligned (see Grogan, 2013 ). As such, and as I've argued before, it was possibly a politically astute move by the positive psychologists to distance themselves from the perceived embarrassments of humanistic psychology if it was to succeed where humanistic psychology had failed in garnering mainstream attention, funding, and prestige (see Joseph and Murphy, 2013a ). But as the positive psychology movement evolved, and gained footholds in the mainstream agenda, its leaders (e.g., Seligman et al., 2005 ) came to acknowledge, perhaps albeit reluctantly and without fully admitting their earlier critical comments were largely unfounded and misleading, that positive psychology built upon the earlier work of the pioneers of humanistic psychology (see DeRobertis and Bland, 2021 ). Whether intentional or not, positive psychology had helped to bring the ideas of humanistic psychology back into the mainstream.

In the early days of positive psychology, I believed that it offered the promise to bring these ideas of Rogers and other humanistic psychologists back into the mainstream agenda of scholars (see Linley and Joseph, 2004a ). Almost two decades later, I think positive psychology has indeed provided an important vehicle for renewed interest in humanistic psychology. Positive psychology has become a richer and deeper form of scholarship as a result. For example, one important shift that seems to reflect the accommodation of ideas from humanistic psychology is the movement toward more eudaimonic conceptualizations of well-being as opposed to the hedonic (Joseph, 2015a ). It is now not so easy to dismiss positive psychology as superficial (e.g., Ehrenreich, 2010 ).

One of the problems, however, in understanding what positive psychology can be, is the idea that all it offers is a corrective balance to mainstream psychology's focus on pathology. While that may be how many think of it, including perhaps how some of its pioneers originally thought of it, positive psychology has the potential to be so much more than that. As Wong ( 2011 ) wrote.

I propose that a stronger argument in support of the legitimacy of PP is that PP is much more than a corrective reaction to the perceived imbalance in the literature. Properly understood, the overarching mission of PP is to answer the fundamental questions of what makes life worth living and how to improve life for all People (p. 69).

To be more than a corrective reaction, it is essential to understand how the negative and the positive are related, and how one cannot understand the positive without the negative—what some have called positive psychology 2.0 (see Wong, 2011 ). There is a rich tapestry of humanistic psychology that positive psychologists are now beginning to unfold, one thread of which is the work of Carl Rogers and the person-centered approach. While Rogers is now widely recognized in positive psychology as one of the original pioneers of a more positive psychological approach, the depth and detail of his work is not in my view well-understood, and particularly how his approach offered a vision for what we now call positive psychology 2.0, or put another way, a meta-theory for positive psychology (Joseph and Linley, 2006a ). In the section below I will discuss the significance for practice of Rogers' ideas—specifically how the person-centered approach proposes that if we want to change people, we need to change their social environment.

Person-Centered Psychology

Rogers was originally a psychologist by training. In 1947 he served as the President of the American Psychological Association; the position later held by Seligman 50 years later when he founded the positive psychology movement. Throughout his life Rogers was a prolific researcher and writer, publishing numerous academic papers and books, many of which are still widely read today (see Kirschenbaum, 2007 ). Most known for his development of client-centered therapy (Rogers, 1951 ), Rogers went on to apply his theory more broadly, offering a theoretical framework encompassing personality development, psychological functioning, and helping relationships across different contexts (Rogers, 1959 ).

Meta-Theory of Human Nature and Development

For the present discussion, however, the way Rogers' theory is most obviously relevant to a discussion of positive psychology is his conceptualization of the fully functioning person (1963a). Rogers ( 1963a ) described the fully functioning person as (1) open to all their experiences, they are sensitive to the world around them, other people's reactions, and their own internal feelings, reactions, and meanings; (2) living existentially, able to be fully present in the moment; and (3) able to trust their feelings and reactions to guide them in their actions. Such a person has a non-defensive attitude, can listen to others empathically, unconditionally, communicate clearly and effectively, and respond to situations creatively. In describing the fully functioning person, Rogers provided an alternative to then dominant illness-related concepts. John Shlien, originally writing in 1956, noted:

In the past, mental health has been a ‘residual' concept – the absence of disease. We need to do more than describe improvement in terms of say ‘anxiety reduction'. We need to say what the person can do as health is achieved. As the emphasis on pathology lessons, there have been a few recent efforts toward positive conceptualizations of mental health. Notable among these are Carl Rogers' ‘fully Functioning Person' …(Shlien, 2003 , p. 17).

The idea that the task should be to promote more fully functioning behavior has always been at the core of person-centered psychology (see Levitt, 2008 ; Joseph, 2015b ). While Rogers' ideas about becoming more fully functioning may have been familiar to person-centered psychologists, they were less known to mainstream psychologists who continued to view mental health as a residual concept, until the advent of positive psychology. It should also be recognized that Rogers approached this work using the methods of traditional empirical psychological science. In this way, it is evident that person-centered psychology is a form of positive psychology.

However, and this now takes me to the main point of my article, positive psychology is not necessarily person-centered. This is because the defining feature of Rogers' person-centered theory of how fully functioning arises, is that it was grounded in a growth model (DeCarvalho, 1991 ; Joseph and Patterson, 2008 ; Joseph and Murphy, 2013b ). Rogers presented a view of human nature in which becoming fully functioning was a state toward which people were intrinsically motivated. For Rogers, the person-centered approach was based on an image of the person that is basically trustworthy, and that humans are intrinsically motivated toward:

…development, differentiation, cooperative relationships; whose life tends to move from dependence to independence; whose impulses tend naturally to harmonize into a complex and changing pattern of self-regulation; whose total character is such as to tend to preserve himself and his species, and perhaps to move toward its further evolution (Rogers, 1957 : p. 201).

Rogers ( 1959 ) referred to this as the actualizing tendency, a universal human motivation resulting in growth, development, and autonomy of the individual. The actualizing tendency, Rogers argued, was the one natural motivational force of human beings and which is always directed toward constructive growth (Rogers, 1963b ). This will happen automatically given the optimal social environment. But too often people don't have the optimal social environment, and the unfolding of the actualizing tendency is usurped and thwarted, leading people to self-actualize in ways that are less than fully functioning. Thus, while both positive psychology and person-centered psychology might often share the same goal, how they do this may be very different and hard to reconcile (see e.g., van Zyl et al., 2016 ). My aim is to reflect on positive psychology from the perspective of the person-centered approach, from the point of view that the term positive psychology simply describes a broad discipline with a range of topics of scholarly and practical interest whereas person-centered psychology is a specific approach to those topics; or put another way, positive psychology is about the content, whereas the person-centered approach is about a process.

There is a famous quote from Kurt Lewin: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Lewin, 1951 , p. 169). I think that Rogers' ( 1959 ) approach provides a brilliant illustration of Lewin's quote. For Rogers, it followed that the logical implication of the growth model was that if people are less than fully functioning because of their social environment, then providing them with the optimal social environment would be necessary and sufficient for constructive personality change. Given the optimal social environment the person's intrinsic motivation toward fully functioning would do the rest 1 .

This ontological view of human nature is what underpins the non-directivity of the person-centered practitioner. Non-directivity is an ideological position that arises from the aforementioned fundamental assumptions of the practitioner that humans are intrinsically motivated toward personal development, differentiation, and cooperative relationships, when in optimal social environments. Non-directivity is a much-misunderstood concept. It does not mean no direction; rather it means the practitioner is not imposing their direction but trusting in and helping the client to find their own direction.

The idea that the world around us influences how we think, and feel is of course not new, and many positive psychologists have already emphasized that attention cannot only be placed on the individual. As Wong ( 2011 ) wrote.

“…you cannot live a healthy and fulfilling life in a sick world contaminated by crime, corruption, injustice, oppression, and poverty. Such evils can destroy individuals and societies like cancer cells. Positive psychology 2.0 emphasizes the need to develop good and decent people as well as a civil society by promoting meaning/virtue and overcoming and transforming negatives” (pp. 77).

Humanistic psychologists of all persuasions would no doubt wholeheartedly agree with this, but what is radically different about Rogers' person-centered approach is that it is all about the social environment—we develop “good and decent people” through the society we create. In short, when the optimal social environment is present, people will automatically move in directions toward fully functioning. This is the theoretical core of the person-centered approach that led to 70 years of research and scholarship concerning the operational definition of what constitutes the optimal social environment to produce constructive personality change (Cornelius-White and Motschnig-Pitrik, 2010 ; Murphy and Joseph, 2016 ). Rogers ( 1959 ) proposed that the optimal social environment was one that was experienced as unconditional, positively regarding, empathic and genuine. Taking these principles seriously in the way that Rogers' theory suggests, is an antidote to crime, corruption, injustice, oppression, and poverty. Imagine if that was the attitudinal climate experienced by children in their homes and schools, and by adults in their workplaces and in all other areas of their life.

Applications: Prevention, and Cure

Up to this point, I've deliberately avoided the topic of psychotherapy as I wanted to make it clear that Rogers' theory is about the social environment and its influence on a person's psychological development, and in this way show how applications of his theory may be upstream in education, parenting, public policy, and so on, concerned with prevention, and not just downstream in psychotherapy and clinical psychology, dealing with problems after they arise. Applications of Rogers' ( 1959 ) theory are as much about ensuring that the unfolding of the person's actualizing tendency is not usurped and thwarted in the first place, as it is about the self-righting process subsequently.

Also, because psychotherapy and clinical psychology, more generally, are often understood from the perspective of an illness ideology, as involving activities in which one person (the therapist) attempts to change another in some predetermined way (the client), discussion of Rogers' ( 1959 ) theory in the context of therapy can be misunderstood, as if the necessary and sufficient conditions are something that one person does to another to get them to change. In this way, I wanted to situate the discussion outside the therapeutic context to avoid this misunderstanding. As such, it might therefore surprise some readers to think of Rogers' conditions as describing a social environment as more often his theory is caricatured as something the therapist does to a patient.

Regardless of the nature of the application of Rogers' approach, however, it is not about doing something to people. The attitudinal conditions of unconditionality, positive regard, empathy and genuineness come together to create the fundamental non-directive attitude of the practitioner, which because of his or her trust in the agency of the client, means that they do not intervene, and have no intention of intervening. As Bozarth ( 1998 ) wrote of client-centered therapy:

“The therapist goes with the client, goes at the client's pace, goes with the client in his/her own ways of thinking, of experiencing, or processing. The therapist cannot be up to other things, have other intentions without violating the essence of person-centered therapy. To be up to other things – whatever they might be – is a ‘yes, but' reaction to the essence of the approach. It must mean that when the therapist has intentions of treatment plans, of treatment goals, of interventive strategies to get the client somewhere or for the client to do a certain thing, the therapist violates the essence of person-centered therapy (Bozarth, 1998 , pp. 11–12).

In creating an empathic, unconditional, and congruent social environment, the therapist is not trying to change the person, has no agenda for the person whatsoever, but they trust that given the optimal environment the person will change toward becoming more fully functioning. Unlike other psychologically based interventions, the person-centered practitioner is not doing anything to the person, they have no agenda for the person to change in any particular way, rather the practitioner's only agenda is for themselves to be able to create a social environment characterized by these conditions. This remains a revolutionary idea in psychology that remains underappreciated in my view, perhaps because while Rogers' theory of therapy is well-known, it is less well-understood that it is about changing the social environment, not the person. And this is what makes it a radically different form of practice to most other psychological interventions, which focus on changing the person. This can be difficult to understand if looking at the person-centered approach from outside its paradigmatic stance. But imagine if you truly believed that people would only move in directions toward becoming more fully functioning when they experience themselves in the optimal social environment.

Originally writing about therapy, Rogers ( 1959 ) soon developed his thinking more widely into how the same optimal social environment could be facilitative of growth in a range of contexts. Psychotherapy and clinical psychology are obvious applications of the person-centered approach, but in these contexts, it is about a self-righting process, helpful to people whose tendency toward actualization has already been usurped and thwarted. Of more importance, in my view, is that positive psychology expends its energy on upstream interventions, to facilitate people's psychological development in the first place, such that the eventual need for psychotherapy and clinical psychology is reduced. In this respect, education is the most powerful institution in the world for shaping the future of humanity because of its influence on how each generation comes to view what matters, and what to prioritize and to value.

Recent years have seen much interest in positive psychology applications to education and the development of the new subfield of “positive education” (Seligman et al., 2009 ). Positive education is a relatively new initiative, but its aims are similar to those of person-centered education, as developed by Carl Rogers in his subsequent writings about the applications of the person-centered approach. In 1969, Rogers published his influential book Freedom to Learn (Rogers, 1969 ), in which, building on his earlier writings, he set out his full philosophy of education: in essence, that human beings have a natural urge to learn, that this most readily happens when the subject matter is perceived as relevant to the student, that learning involves change and as such is threatening and resisted; that learning is best achieved by doing, and that the most lasting learning takes place in an atmosphere of freedom in which students were trusted to be autonomous learners. In essence, the goal of education should be to assist people to learn to be self-determining; to take self-initiated action and to be responsible for those actions; to be able to adapt flexibly and intelligently to new problem situations; internalize an adaptive mode of approach to problems, utilizing all pertinent experience freely and creatively; cooperate effectively with others in these various activities; and work, not for the approval of others, but in terms of their own socialized purposes. To adopt other goals in which the teacher has a pre-determined intention that the student should change in any particular direction was seen from Rogers' person-centered perspective as contradictory to the act of nurturing self-determination.

While Rogers' influence has been greatest in the field of psychotherapy, it is I would argue his contributions to education which are the most significant and important for the modern world. However, Rogers' writings on person-centered education have received little attention in the positive education literature. Positive education, whilst offering a new focus on human flourishing, does not challenge traditional education with its largely teacher-centered approach. Rogers' view on education was that it was this teacher-centered approach that was itself the problem that thwarted and usurped developmental processes and stifled creativity and curiosity. Both person-centered education and positive education have a shared focus on human flourishing. But what makes person-centered education different to positive education is its clear ontological stance that people are their own best experts, and the resultant hypothesis that with the right social environment, students will be self-determining and move in autonomous and socially constructive directions (see Joseph et al., 2020 ).

All the different applications of the person-centered approach—whether downstream in the domains of clinical psychology, coaching, counseling, conflict resolution, psychotherapy; or upstream in business, education, encounter groups, leadership, management, parenting, or policy, are all about changing the social environment, because they are grounded in a vision of humanity in which people are always striving toward becoming fully functioning, a tendency which will automatically be released when the social environment is optimal. This is what makes the person-centered approach distinctive, the fact that its interventions are always about changing the social environment and not about changing the person. And in changing the social environment, people will change in a way that is toward becoming more fully functioning. In turn, more fully functioning people, by definition, will create more facilitative social environments for others (Motschnig-Pitrik and Barrett-Lennard, 2010 ). This way of thinking is what I believe would make for a more person-centered positive psychology. But, as already indicated, a more person-centered positive psychology involves more than a simple change of focus from the individual to the social, it also challenges us to think from a different paradigmatic stance and to ask questions about the positionality of positive psychology, its politics, and its subtle use of power over others.

Toward a More Person-Centered Positive Psychology

In this final section I will offer some reflections on positive psychology from the perspective of person-centered psychology. In so doing, I hope to show how a consideration of the person-centered approach leads to questions about positionality, politics, and power in positive psychology.

The Unspoken Positionality of Positive Psychology

One criticism that I have heard leveled against Rogers' theory many times is that it is an ideological position. This argument implies however that there is a neutral position that one could take while waiting for that evidence. But as Burr ( 2015 , p. 172) wrote: “No human can step outside their humanity and view the world from no position at all, and this is just as true of scientists as of everyone else.” All interventions in psychology represent ideological positions and this is one of the lessons to be learned for positive psychology as it moves forward. All forms of psychological practice and policy are grounded in a vision of the human being (Joseph, 2017 ). But for positive psychology, if not the growth model, what model?

To illustrate what I mean, first, all constructs used in research are derived from theories that represent an ideological position, whether expressed implicitly or explicitly, and in turn, the choice of which constructs to investigate represents one's own ideological views. Second, how we interpret the implications for practice from research is ideological. For example, research shows that greater authenticity leads to greater well-being. The implication is that increasing levels of authenticity would be desirable. But what sort of intervention should be designed to promote authenticity? There is nothing inherent in the research finding itself that presupposes the nature of the intervention, whether it be through changing the social environment or by altering the person's thoughts, feelings or behaviors. If one holds to the growth model, then changing the social environment will make sense. But if it is thought that people need instruction from others, then introducing interventions targeted directly at somehow pushing the person toward authenticity will make sense.

In this way, the choice of intervention only looks like it arises out of the research findings if one thinks of oneself as taking a neutral position. Interventions are always ideologically driven and based on the researcher's or practitioner's assumptions about human nature. And those assumptions about human nature are baked into the design of research and the language used to discuss findings. Of course, subsequent research can show support or fail to show support for an intervention, and in that way, we can be guided subsequently by research. If changing the environment doesn't work, then maybe we need to push. But, if there is no neutral position, which ideological position should be our default setting? Furthermore, out positionality also determines what factors are deemed appropriate as targets for intervention. In sum, most positive psychology interventions involve directive interventions targeted at changing the person in ways decided upon by the practitioner as best for the client, which presupposes an ideological position that runs counter to a growth model.

The Hidden Politics of Positive Psychology

If we reflect on one reason for the demise of humanistic psychology being its clash with conservative ideologies (Elkins, 2009 ), I believe we also learn about the success of positive psychology. One of the features of the conservative ideology is its focus on individualism, and it is a focus on individualism that has led to the rise of a culture in which positive psychology research has been used to promote mindfulness in school children, to deal with the stressors of failing educational systems, resilience training in workers to help them cope with punitive workloads, and well-being applications to help people manage the stresses of economic insecurity (Joseph, 2020 ). The person-centered psychologist would see the challenges in such situations to be how to create more growth promoting climates in schools, and workplaces, and in everyday life, how to build more empathic, genuine, and unconditional relationships in which people can be autonomous and free from coercion and control, and thus able to express themselves in a more socially constructive way. This too could be the research agenda for positive psychology if it took seriously a model of growth as its paradigm.

The word paradigm is often overused to refer to new ideas and practices, but its real meaning is that of a world view underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject. Within the history of psychology, the growth model of person-centered psychology represented a genuine paradigm shift from the first and second forces in psychology, the behaviorist image of the human being as a blank slate on which anything could be written or the psychoanalytical view of the human being as driven by destructive impulses (see DeCarvalho, 1991 ). I believe that positive psychology was a welcome shift in the everyday business of mainstream psychology, but as Seligman ( 2004 ) made clear, it was not a paradigm shift. It continued to operate within the same world view as mainstream psychology. Thus, despite the language of positivity, it appears to me that positive psychology as a movement, largely continues to operate within models that implicitly condone the idea that less than fully functioning human behavior is not so much the result of the social environment, but of a deficit in the person themselves (an absence of a strength), and thus putting the responsibility on the person to manage or cope better in adverse circumstances.

Positive psychologists might not always be the people behind such interventions, but it is the technology and tools of positive psychology which are used when stressed and overworked employees are forced by their managers to attend well-being sessions, or school children are given mindfulness classes to cope with the mental health concerns. The gap that exists between research and practice might blind some to how their research is understood and used, and how ultimately its implementation may condone ideas about deficit and dysfunction within the person. In sum, if we reflect on the demise of humanistic psychology relative to the success of positive psychology, we might wonder if the latter's rise was at least in part because it fits well with the demands of conservative ideologies and the need for many organizations and institutions to control and coerce people to behave in particular ways, which presupposes an ideological position that runs counter to a growth model.

The Subtle Use of Power in Positive Psychology

One of the ways in which psychology has power over people is through its adoption of the medical model. Humanistic psychology has long challenged the traditionally accepted parameters in psychology, including the model of a practitioner taken from medicine (Bugental, 1963 ). Rogers' ( 1959 ) approach succeeded in doing this because of how he theorized the nature of psychological problems as having a unitary cause in incongruence and he offered a form of therapy which was about the social environment; in these ways he moved beyond a separation of the negative and the positive into distinct fields of study, and the need for practitioners to take an expert stance over the person's inner experiences. In this way, the person-centered approach offers a different understanding of the power relations between practitioners and clients. Positive psychology promises to offer an alternative to the medicalisation of human experience (Maddux and Lopez, 2015 ), but yet it does so only in the most superficial of ways by not using the language of medicine but continuing to condone the essential elements of the medical model (see Joseph and Linley, 2006b ).

The first way it does this is because the remit of positive psychology is often seen as a supplement to traditional psychology, which focuses on distress and dysfunction. In doing this it serves to condone the idea that there is a separation between the clinical and the more fully functioning aspects of human experience. The person-centered conceptualization is that while there is a universal human tendency toward actualization, this tendency becomes thwarted in non-optimal social environments, which create an incongruence between the tendency toward actualization and self-actualization. As such, it is usual for people to self-actualize in ways that are less than fully functioning. In this way, person-centered therapy effectively posits a unitary cause of distress, but varied expressions of that distress will arise according to the uniqueness of each individual's incongruence (see Sanders and Joseph, 2016 ).

A second way in which positive psychology continues to condone an illness ideology is through the notion that different interventions are needed for different states of positivity. It is a common assumption in clinical psychology that different interventions are needed for different clinical states, referred to as the specificity myth by person-centered psychologists (Bozarth and Motomasa, 2005 ). It is an assumption from clinical psychology that is applied to positive psychology that there are specific interventions for specific positive psychological states. But it is an assumption that runs counter to the person-centered proposal that there is a unitary cause of distress and growth, and thus a single form of intervention. Shlien ( 1989 ) wrote:

‘Client-centered therapy has only one treatment for all cases. That fact makes diagnosis entirely useless. If you have no specific treatment to relate to it, what possible purpose could there be to specific diagnosis? Nothing remains but the detrimental effects.' (p. 402).

The need for diagnosis, formulation, and all expressions of expertise over the person dissolve when it is the social environment that is the focus of intervention, not the person (Joseph, 2021 ). In this way, the positive psychologist may not be using diagnosis in the clinical sense, but if they are developing an intervention suitable for some people but not others, the same logic applies. As such, much of contemporary positive psychology remains underpinned by the medical model, but that fact is disguised by its language of strengths, virtues, and happiness. In sum, the assumption that different problems or people require different interventions leads the practitioner to take an expert stance, implying that they know what the client needs better than the client knows themselves, which presupposes an ideological position that runs counter to a growth model.

Conclusions

As described above, reflection on positive psychology from the perspective of the person-centered approach leads to questions about the positionality of positive psychology, its politics, and its subtle promotion of power. The adoption of a growth model leads to a different way of addressing these same issues.

A growth model offers: (1) an alternative nomological net of variables for research, to do with the quality of relationships, growth promoting climates, and fully functioning personality dimensions, with (2) different implications for practice, to do with non-directive rather than directive interventions, and (3) significance in terms of real-world relationships between people, institutions, and society, as the aim is to work toward a social environment free from corruption, injustice, oppression, and poverty, and all other ways in which the growth of people is usurped and thwarted.

For researchers, this offers new challenges to understand whether and in what ways people will be intrinsically motivated to move in positive psychological directions when in optimal social environments, and how to define the optimal social environment, across different contexts and cultures. It alerts researchers that research findings in themselves do not indicate an approach to an intervention, and that there is a need to understand the relative merits of directive and non-directive approaches. It also helps us think about how our research is used by others and what other agendas our findings might be used to serve.

Such a shift in thinking would also have implications for what it means to be a positive psychologist. For example, in psychotherapy and clinical psychology, the practitioner must learn new ways of relating to people. Or in education, the educationalist must learn to trust in their students that they have the intrinsic need to learn and to develop. Adopting a person-centered approach to practice offers challenges to positive psychologists in terms of their own psychological development. Because the person-centered approach focuses on the relational climate that the practitioner fosters through their ability to be genuine, empathic, and congruent, the importance of the practitioner's own psychological development and emotional maturity cannot be understated.

Positive psychology is a broad discipline of study and practice. It isn't defined in terms of its approach. Positive psychologists take a variety of approaches to their work, including a person-centered approach, although it may not always be recognized as such.

While my own vision is for a more person-centered positive psychology, and that is the branch of positive psychology that I identify with most strongly, it might be said by some that it is a strength of positive psychology that it has no single paradigmatic positionality on human nature, as that allows for great flexibility in exploration, crossing between ideas and assumptions about human nature traditionally associated with the psychoanalytical, behavioral, and humanistic. As a discipline I would agree that positive psychology need not take any single paradigmatic stance. But that is not the same as it being neutral, as each instance of research or practice does have a stance, whether it is made explicit or not. Unless each researcher and practitioner acknowledges their own positionality, and describes how their focus of interest, measures chosen, and so on, arises from their point of view, what otherwise appears like a coherent and building body of knowledge is actually founded on a tangle of different assumptions. What could be a strength is a weakness. It is a weakness when positionality in research and practice is implicit and unacknowledged, as if it were not true that all research and practice comes from a position, as it allows for the fact that all research and practice is ultimately ideological to go unnoticed.

Seen like this, positive psychology provides a smorgasbord of methods, lacking in any single underpinning ontological approach. In this respect, positive psychology is not person-centered, but person-centered psychology can be thought of as a specific approach to positive psychology. Recognizing it as such places a much-needed new stake firmly in the ground to draw attention to, and create a tension with, whatever the other implicitly accepted ontological stances of mainstream positive psychology are, and which often imply that people's intrinsic motivation cannot be relied upon.

In these ways, I believe that positive psychology can learn from the person-centered position, to realize the often dark and destructive images of humanity that actually lie at the core of much contemporary positive psychology, disguised by its language of positivity. Despite the similarity in stated goals there can be gulf between humanistic and positive psychology. To close the gap, perhaps it may be helpful for positive psychologists to revisit Bugental's ( 1964 ) five basic principles of humanistic psychology and make them their own. Moving forward with a new research agenda, positive psychologists must become more explicit about their own positionality, to be clear what theoretical assumptions underpin their choice to focus either on the person or the social environment. Respecting the humanistic image of the human being and, consequently, considering and influencing people's social environment to facilitate personal growth would promote cross-fertilization between positive psychology and the person-centered approach instead of widening their gap. It would be useful for positive psychologists to be open regarding their image of humanity, thus offering positive psychology as an umbrella for interventions from different theoretical foundations and making that explicit would seem a step forward for positive psychology and a door-opener to include the person-centered approach.

In summary, while the move toward studying the good life is surely to be welcomed, in taking up the baton from humanistic psychology, positive psychologists left behind what I believe is the most vital part of the humanistic approach—its view of human nature. Whereas, humanistic psychology and specifically the person-centered approach provided an alternative growth paradigm to the behavioral and psychoanalytical schools that had come before, positive psychology as a whole takes no single paradigmatic stance. This might be seen as a strength for a discipline, but it is misleading to think that this means that each instance of research or practice is not based in a paradigm. Positive psychology may use the language of positivity, yet implicitly condone ideas about deficit and dysfunction within the person, and talk about growth, yet promote practices that quietly curtail freedom and self-direction. In this way, positive psychology may yet learn from humanistic psychology that our ideas about how to treat people are always based in our visions of human nature.

Data Availability Statement

Author contributions.

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

1 It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into the detail, but it is worth noting that this view of human nature was also taken up and developed subsequently by Ryan and Deci ( 2000 ) in their self-determination theory, which, by and large, offers theory and evidence consistent with and supportive of Rogers' theory (see Sheldon and Kasser, 2001 ; Patterson and Joseph, 2007 ; Joseph and Murphy, 2013b ; Sheldon, 2013 ).

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Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic psychologists emphasise looking at individuals as a whole, considering a range of influences on them and trying to explain healthy, ‘normal’ growth in humans.

Free will: Other approaches to psychology are determinist to a greater or lesser extent, believing that human behaviour id shaped or determined by influences such as biology, learning, upbringing and so on. Humanistic psychology suggests that humans actually have free will over their actions- the ability to make genuine free choices over their actions. Therefore, it rejects the attempts by other approaches to establish general laws of behaviour, suggesting that human behaviour is unpredictable and that each person is unique, as everyone makes their own choices in life.

Self-actualisation: Maslow believed that humans have a ‘hierarchy of needs’ which need to be met in order to be satisfied, and develop as a person. The most basic needs are physiological (food, water and so on), followed by safety and security (having a home and family), love and belongingness, (having friends and positive relationships with family members), self-esteem (self-confidence and respect of others), and finally self-actualisation (creativity and spontaneity). Self-actualisation is the ability of humans to develop and achieve their potential. If the other, more basic needs are not met, then the person cannot self-actualise any may become unhappy or depressed as a result.

The self and congruence: Rogers suggested that in order to grow and develop, there must be congruence (equivalence) between a person’s concept of self- the person they perceive themselves as- and their ideal self- the person they would like to be. If there is too big a gap between these, the person experiences incongruence and will not be able to self-actualise, therefore possibly becoming anxious and depressed.

Client-centred therapy: Developed by Rogers, this aims to achieve congruence in the client, who takes an active role in the therapy. The cause of incongruence may have been a lack of unconditional positive regard from parents- this means that the person’s parents attached ‘conditions of worth’ to them- setting conditions on their love. For example, telling them they will only love them if they achieve something (good exam results). This creates psychological problems for the person. In the therapy, the therapist provides the client with unconditional positive regard, along with empathy and genuineness, to try and reduce the incongruence between the client’s concept of self and ideal self.

Evaluation:

• This approach is more holistic than many others, as it considers a range of influences on a person and does not try to explain behaviour in simplistic terms. This is a strength as it better represents the complexity of human behaviour.
• Humanistic psychology is a more positive approach than others, as it is optimistic and focused on personal growth and development. People are seen as essentially good, and able to better themselves. This is more optimistic than, for example, Freud’s theory.
• The approach is not very scientifically rigorous, as concepts such as the self and congruence are hard to test empirically. This weakens the approach, as it lacks scientific credibility.

Views on Development

• Psychodynamic approach: clear and coherent (psychosexual stages)
• Cognitive approach: explains child development- going through stages- and development of schema
• Biological approach: development is due to physical development, e.g. brain growth and complexity
• Humanistic approach: parents have a role in development. The self can be developed throughout life
• Learning approaches (behaviourism, SLT): learning happens in the same way at any stage of life (no account of development)

Nature vs Nurture

(Behaviour is innate vs behaviour due to environment)

• Learning approaches (behaviourist, SLT): support nurture. Humans are ‘blank slates’ and are products of learning and upbringing
• Biological approach: supports nature. Behaviour caused by physiological processes affected by genes
• Psychodynamic approach: supports nature (innate drives and instincts) and nurture (role of upbringing- psychosexual stages)
• Humanistic approach: supports nature (natural tendency to self-actualise) and nurture (relationship with parents and others)
• Cognitive approach: supports nature (biological processing abilities) and nurture (development of schema through environment)

Reductionism vs Holism

(Breaking down behaviour into parts that can be studied vs considering a range of factors on behaviour)

• Behaviourist approach: very reductionist- behaviour due to stimulus-response
• Social learning approach: slightly less reductionist, as does consider cognition
• Biological approach: very reductionist- explaining behaviour in terms of levels of chemicals, brain structure
• Psychodynamic approach: quite reductionist- behaviour due to primitive drives, but does consider upbringing and other factors
• Cognitive approach: accused of machine reductionism- treating humans as if they were computers. Although, does consider how cognitions affect learning and interact with other influences
• Humanistic approach: holistic. Considers a range of influences on an individual person

Determinism vs Free Will

(Behaviour determined by factors outside of someone’s control vs behaviour is due to conscious free choice)

• Behaviourist approach: determinist (‘hard determinism’). Behaviour due to learning processes outside of our control
• Biological approach: determinist (‘hard determinism’). Behaviour due to brain structure, genes, neurotransmitter, outside of our control
• Psychodynamic approach: psychic determinism (‘hard determinism’)- behaviour due to unconscious drives and instincts outside of our control
• Cognitive approach: determinist (‘soft determinism’)- behaviour guided by existing schema and stage of development, but there is some choice over thoughts
• Social learning approach: reciprocal determinism (‘soft determinism’)- behaviour guided by learning, but some choice over which actions we choose to perform
• Humanistic approach: free will. Behaviour is down to the conscious free choice of the individual

Explanations of Abnormal Behaviour

The approaches explain that abnormal behaviour is due to:

• Behaviourist approach: faulty learning (negative behaviour has been reinforced somehow). Can be treated by ‘unlearning’- counter-conditioning.
• Social learning approach: negative/dysfunctional role models.
• Psychodynamic approach: childhood trauma, unresolved unconscious conflicts, overuse of defence mechanisms. Can be treated by uncovering and resolving repressed conflicts through psychotherapy.
• Cognitive approach: faulty/irrational thought processes. Can be treated by CBT, in which negative thoughts are challenged.
• Humanistic approach: incongruence between concept of self and ideal self, inability to self-actualise. Can be treated through achieving congruence through client-centred therapy.
• Biological approach: imbalance of hormones/neurotransmitters, genetic inheritance, faulty brain structure/workings. Can be treated through drug therapy.

Idiographic vs Nomothetic

(Studying and explaining individual behaviour through case studies vs studying large groups to establish general laws)

• Learning approaches (behaviourist, SLT): nomothetic
• Cognitive approach: nomothetic (although does use case studies as evidence)
• Biological approach: nomothetic (although does use case studies as evidence)
• Psychodynamic approach: idiographic
• Humanistic approach: idiographic

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The Humanistic approach -A-Level Psychology

The humanistic approach:.

-an approach to understanding behaviour that emphasises the importance of subjective experience and each person’s capacity for self determination.

The notion that humans can make choices and are not determined by biological or external factors and act as active agents.Humanistic psychologists reject scientific models that establish general principles of human behaviour as everyone is unique.

Self-actualisation:

The desire to grow psychologically and fulfil one’s full potential.All four lower levels have to be met for self-actualisation to occur.Personal growth is concerned with developing and changing as a person to become fulfilled ,satisfied,and goal orientated.

The self,congruence and conditions of worth:

Rogers argued that for personal growth to occur an individual’s self(the way they see themselves)has to be in congruence with their ideal self.If the gap is too big ,the person will experience incongruence and negative feelings meaning that self-actualisation can’t be reached.

Conditions of worth-when a parent places limits or boundaries on their love of their children.

Evaluation:

Cultural bias-the humanistic approach would be applicable to individualist cultures more than to collectivist cultures which may not easily identify with the ideas of humanistic psychology.

Not reductionist-Humanists reject any attempt to break up behaviour and experience into smaller components,instead they advocate holism(the idea that subjective experience can only be understood by considering the whole person).This approach has more validity than its alternatives by considering meaningful human behaviour within its real-life context.

The Humanistic approach is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the unique experiences and potential for growth of the individual. It suggests that people have free will and are capable of making choices that can lead to personal growth and self-actualization.

The key figures associated with the Humanistic approach in A-Level Psychology are Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.

The Humanistic approach differs from other psychological perspectives in A-Level Psychology, such as the psychodynamic and behavioral approaches, by emphasizing the subjective experiences of the individual and their potential for self-growth and self-actualization, rather than focusing on unconscious processes or external stimuli.

Some practical applications of the Humanistic approach in A-Level Psychology include person-centered therapy, which emphasizes the importance of the therapist-client relationship and the client’s self-exploration, and positive psychology, which focuses on promoting well-being and resilience through interventions such as gratitude journaling and mindfulness meditation.

Studying the Humanistic approach in A-Level Psychology can benefit you by providing you with a deeper understanding of human behavior and the human experience, and by equipping you with practical skills for promoting personal growth and well-being. Additionally, knowledge of the Humanistic approach may be useful for those considering careers in counseling or mental health.

You can apply the Humanistic approach in your own life by focusing on your personal growth and self-actualization, and by making choices that align with your values and goals. This might involve practicing self-reflection, setting realistic goals for yourself, and seeking out opportunities for personal development and self-expression.

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Theoretical Perspectives of Psychology (Psychological Approaches)

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

There may be several theories within an approach, but they all share these assumptions.

The five major psychological perspectives are biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic, and provide different lenses through which phenomena are explained and analyzed.

You may wonder why there are so many different psychological approaches and whether one approach is correct and another wrong.

Most psychologists would agree that no one approach is correct, although in the past, in the early days of psychology, the behaviorist would have said their perspective was the only truly scientific one.

Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and brings something different to our understanding of human behavior.  For this reason, it is important that psychology does have different perspectives on the understanding and study of human and animal behavior.

Below is a summary of the six main psychological approaches (sometimes called perspectives) in psychology.

Behaviorist Perspective

If your layperson’s idea of psychology has always been about people in laboratories wearing white coats and watching hapless rats try to negotiate mazes in order to get to their dinner, then you are probably thinking about behavioral psychology.

Behaviorism is different from most other approaches because they view people (and animals) as controlled by their environment and specifically that we are the result of what we have learned from our environment.

The behaviorist perspective is concerned with how environmental factors (called stimuli) affect observable behavior (called the response).

The behaviorist perspective proposes two main processes whereby people learn from their environment: namely classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning involves learning by association, and operant conditioning involves learning from the consequences of behavior.

Classical conditioning (CC) was studied by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov . Though looking into natural reflexes and neutral stimuli he managed to condition dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell through repeated associated with the sound of the bell and food.

The principles of CC have been applied in many therapies. These include systematic desensitization for phobias (step-by-step exposed to a feared stimulus at once) and aversion therapy.

B.F. Skinner investigated operant conditioning of voluntary and involuntary behavior. Skinner felt that some behavior could be explained by the person’s motive. Therefore behavior occurs for a reason, and the three main behavior shaping techniques are positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment.

Behaviorism also believes in scientific methodology (e.g., controlled experiments), and that only observable behavior should be studied because this can be objectively measured. Behaviorism rejects the idea that people have free will, and believes that the environment determines all behavior.

Behaviorism is the scientific study of observable behavior working on the basis that behavior can be reduced to learned S-R (Stimulus-Response) units.

Behaviorism has been criticized in the way it under-estimates the complexity of human behavior. Many studies used animals which are hard to generalize to humans, and it cannot explain, for example, the speed in which we pick up language. There must be biological factors involved.

Psychodynamic Perspective

Who hasn’t heard of Sigmund Freud ? So many expressions of our daily life come from Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis – subconscious, denial, repression, and anal personality, to name only a few.

Freud believes that events in our childhood can have a significant impact on our behavior as adults. He also believed that people have little free will to make choices in life. Instead, our behavior is determined by the unconscious mind and childhood experiences.

Freud’s psychoanalysis is both a theory and therapy. It is the original psychodynamic theory and inspired psychologists such as Jung and Erikson to develop their own psychodynamic theories. Freud’s work is vast, and he has contributed greatly to psychology as a discipline.

Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis , explained the human mind as like an iceberg, with only a small amount of it being visible, that is our observable behavior, but it is the unconscious, submerged mind that has the most, underlying influence on our behavior.

Freud used three main methods of accessing the unconscious mind : free association, dream analysis and slips of the tongue .

He believed that the unconscious mind consisted of three components: the “ id” the “ego” and the “superego.”   The “id” contains two main instincts: “Eros”, which is the life instinct, which involves self-preservation and sex which is fuelled by the “libido” energy force. “Thanatos” is the death instinct, whose energies, because they are less powerful than those of “Eros” are channeled away from ourselves and into aggression towards others.

The “id” and the “superego” are constantly in conflict with each other, and the “ego” tries to resolve the discord. If this conflict is not resolved, we tend to use defense mechanisms to reduce our anxiety. Psychoanalysis attempts to help patients resolve their inner conflicts.

An aspect of psychoanalysis is Freud’s theory of psychosexual development . It shows how early experiences affect adult personality. Stimulation of different areas of the body is important as the child progresses through the important developmental stages. Too much or too little can have bad consequences later.

The most important stage is the phallic stage where the focus of the libido is on the genitals.  During this stage little boys experience the “ Oedipus complex “, and little girls experience the “ Electra complex .” These complexes result in children identifying with their same-sex parent, which enables them to learn sex-appropriate behavior and a moral code of conduct.

However, it has been criticized in the way that it over emphasizes the importance of sexuality and under emphasized the role of social relationships. The theory is not scientific, and can’t be proved as it is circular.

Nevertheless, psychoanalysis has been greatly contributory to psychology in that it has encouraged many modern theorists to modify it for the better, using its basic principles, but eliminating its major flaws.

Humanistic Perspective

Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person (know as holism).  Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior, not only through the eyes of the observer, but through the eyes of the person doing the behaving.

Humanistic psychologists believe that an individual’s behavior is connected to his inner feelings and self-image . The humanistic perspective centers on the view that each person is unique and individual, and has the free will to change at any time in his or her life.

The humanistic perspective suggests that we are each responsible for our own happiness and well-being as humans. We have the innate (i.e., inborn) capacity for self-actualization, which is our unique desire to achieve our highest potential as people.

Because of this focus on the person and his or her personal experiences and subjective perception of the world the humanists regarded scientific methods as inappropriate for studying behavior.

Two of the most influential and enduring theories in humanistic psychology that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s are those of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow .

Cognitive Perspective

Psychology was institutionalized as a science in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt , who found the first psychological laboratory.

His initiative was soon followed by other European and American Universities. These early laboratories, through experiments, explored areas such as memory and sensory perception, both of which Wundt believed to be closely related to physiological processes in the brain.

The whole movement had evolved from the early philosophers, such as Aristotle and Plato. Today this approach is known as cognitive psychology .

Cognitive Psychology revolves around the notion that if we want to know what makes people tick then the way to do it is to figure out what processes are actually going on in their minds. In other words, psychologists from this perspective study cognition which is ‘the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired.’

The cognitive perspective is concerned with “mental” functions such as memory , perception , attention , etc. It views people as being similar to computers in the way we process information (e.g., input-process-output). For example, both human brains and computers process information, store data and have input an output procedure.

This had led cognitive psychologists to explain that memory comprises of three stages: encoding (where information is received and attended to), storage (where the information is retained) and retrieval (where the information is recalled).

It is an extremely scientific approach and typically uses lab experiments to study human behavior. The cognitive approach has many applications including cognitive therapy and eyewitness testimony .

Biological Perspective In Psychology

The biological perspective states that all thoughts, feeling & behavior ultimately have a biological cause. It is one of the major perspectives in psychology and involves such things as studying the brain, genetics, hormones, and the immune and nervous systems.

Theorists in the biological perspective who study behavioral genomics consider how genes affect behavior. Now that the human genome is mapped, perhaps, we will someday understand more precisely how behavior is affected by the DNA we inherit.

Biological factors such as chromosomes, hormones and the brain all have a significant influence on human behavior, for example, gender .

The biological approach believes that most behavior is inherited and has an adaptive (or evolutionary) function. For example, in the weeks immediately after the birth of a child, levels of testosterone in fathers drop by more than 30 percent.

This has an evolutionary function. Testosterone-deprived men are less likely to wander off in search of new mates to inseminate. They are also less aggressive, which is useful when there is a baby around.

Biological psychologists explain behaviors in neurological terms, i.e., the physiology and structure of the brain and how this influences behavior.

Many biological psychologists have concentrated on abnormal behavior and have tried to explain it.  For example, biological psychologists believe that schizophrenia is affected by levels of dopamine (a neurotransmitter).

These findings have helped psychiatry take off and help relieve the symptoms of mental illness through drugs. However, Freud and other disciplines would argue that this just treats the symptoms and not the cause.

This is where health psychologists take the finding that biological psychologists produce and look at the environmental factors that are involved to get a better picture.

Evolutionary Psychology

A central claim of evolutionary psychology is that the brain (and therefore the mind) evolved to solve problems encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors during the upper Pleistocene period over 10,000 years ago.

The Evolutionary approach explains behavior in terms of the selective pressures that shape behavior. Most behaviors that we see/display are believed to have developed during our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptation) to help us survive.

Observed behavior is likely to have developed because it is adaptive. It has been naturally selected, i.e., individuals who are best adapted to survive and reproduce. behaviors may even be sexually selected, i.e., individuals who are most successful in gaining access to mates leave behind more offspring.

The mind is therefore equipped with ‘instincts’ that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce.

A strength of this approach is that it can explain behaviors that appear dysfunctional, such as anorexia, or behaviors that make little sense in a modern context, such as our biological stress response when finding out we are overdrawn at the bank.

Perspectives Conclusion

Therefore, in conclusion, there are so many different perspectives in psychology to explain the different types of behavior and give different angles.  No one perspective has explanatory powers over the rest.

Only with all the different types of psychology, which sometimes contradict one another (nature-nurture debate), overlap with each other (e.g. psychoanalysis and child psychology) or build upon one another (biological and health psychologist) can we understand and create effective solutions when problems arise, so we have a healthy body and a healthy mind.

The fact that there are different perspectives represents the complexity and richness of human (and animal) behavior. A scientific approach, such as Behaviorism or cognitive psychology, tends to ignore the subjective (i.e., personal) experiences that people have.

The humanistic perspective does recognize human experience, but largely at the expense of being non-scientific in its methods and ability to provide evidence.  The psychodynamic perspective concentrates too much on the unconscious mind and childhood. As such, it tends to lose sight of the role of socialization (which is different in each country) and the possibility of free will.

The biological perspective reduces humans to a set of mechanisms and physical structures that are clearly essential and important (e.g., genes).  However, it fails to account for consciousness and the influence of the environment on behavior.

What is the difference between a psychological perspective and a field in psychology?

Psychology approaches refer to theoretical perspectives or frameworks used to understand, explain, and predict human behavior, such as behaviorism, cognitive, or psychoanalytic approaches.

Branches of psychology are specialized fields or areas of study within psychology, like clinical psychology, developmental psychology, or school psychology.

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What Is Humanistic Psychology?

W hen considering in-person or online therapy , it’s important to choose an approach that suits you. Humanistic therapy, a form of psychotherapy , is one approach that therapists may use. It focuses on each person’s individuality as a key to growth.

Read on to learn more about the practice of humanistic psychology and how to find a provider.

Humanistic psychology is an approach to therapy that emphasizes what makes us human. Practitioners believe that individuals are self-aware, can take responsibility for their actions, and have the power to make meaningful changes in their lives. Humanistic therapists adopt a holistic perspective, viewing individuality as a combination of mind, body, and spirit.

An article published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews emphasizes that humanistic therapists believe people are naturally driven to reach their full potential and just need the right conditions to support that process.

The humanistic theory emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the dominant theories of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. These schools of thought were based on the assumption that people behave and think in certain ways because of outside influences. This perspective on human nature threatened the idea of free will. During the “human potential” movement that followed, humanistic psychologists offered a more positive and empowering point of view, according to an article published in 2021 in Frontiers in Psychology .

Humanistic psychologists acknowledge the value of behaviorism and psychoanalysis but recognize their limitations in capturing the complexity of the human experience, according to a  chapter on substance abuse treatment protocol published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) .

The psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” was a founding tenet of humanistic psychology. He proposed that human beings have various needs , and only when those needs are met can someone achieve self-actualization, or the realization of their highest potential. Today, humanistic therapy still centers on fostering personal growth with empathy and care so people can become their best selves.

A  meta-analysis of 91 studies published in the  Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change  found that humanistic psychology can be a successful therapeutic approach. Research shows it can be an effective treatment option for many issues, such as:

• Relationship issues
• Coping with chronic health conditions like HIV or cancer
• Substance use disorder (SUD)
• Eating disorders

According to the American Psychological Association (APA) , many therapeutic approaches fall under the banner of humanistic psychology. All humanistic therapies emphasize the importance of active listening, finding meaning in life, and empowerment.

Below, we break down some of the most common types of humanistic therapy.

Person-Centered Therapy

Person-centered therapy — also known as client-centered or Rogerian therapy — asserts that you are the ultimate expert on your own life. It was inspired by the work of Carl Rogers, an American psychotherapist who believed that everyone has a subjective perspective on the world. Rather than offering advice or directing you, your therapist provides sincere interest and support while you delve into the sources of your distress and find ways to feel better. They focus on your values and strengths, fostering positivity and facilitating transformative life changes.

Existential Therapy

Existential therapy emphasizes your capacity to make choices, change the course of your life, and find meaning, according to the APA . In therapy, existential anxiety is considered a central part of life. In other words, it’s normal to be concerned with major issues like the meaning of life, death, freedom, and isolation. Confronting and exploring these subjects with your therapist can guide you toward a more authentic, fulfilling life, according to an  article published in the  Humanistic Psychologist .

Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt therapy centers on the “here and now,” acknowledging that therapy can bring up unresolved conflicts and negative thought patterns. The goal is to direct your focus toward yourself, your feelings, and your responsibilities. Through direct conversations and encounters with your therapist, you can begin to address these existential issues and move forward.

Humanistic therapy could be a good fit if its guiding principles resonate with you. You should believe that you are self-aware, can take responsibility for your actions, and have the power to make meaningful changes in your life.

Humanistic therapists prioritize active listening, empathy, and building a strong therapeutic relationship.

For more information about other approaches to therapy, read our guide to some of the most common types of therapy .

If you’re interested in seeing a therapist who incorporates humanistic psychology into their approach, use filters or keywords during your search. Look for terms like “humanistic,” “client-centered,” or “existential” in therapist biographies.

Keep in mind that many therapists incorporate humanistic theory into their practice. Most practitioners use key elements — such as a focus on building a strong therapeutic relationship — whether or not they identify as a “humanistic therapist.”

When seeking a therapist, consider factors besides their approach, such as credentials, experience, specialties, and style, to find the right therapist for you.

Humanistic psychology emphasizes individuality and potential for change. Humanistic therapists view you as an expert on your life, challenges, and solutions. Many therapists use techniques of humanistic psychology, even if they don’t specialize in humanistic therapy. A therapeutic approach that aligns with your needs is one of many factors that contribute to your success in therapy.

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• Joseph S. How Humanistic Is Positive Psychology? Lessons in Positive Psychology From Carl Rogers' Person-Centered Approach — It's the Social Environment That Must Change. Frontiers in Psychology . September 2021.
• Churchill R et al. Humanistic Therapies Versus Other Psychological Therapies for Depression. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews . September 2010.
• Elliott R et al. Research on Humanistic-Experiential Psychotherapies. In: Lambert MJ, ed.  Bergin & Garfield's Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change . 2021.
• Humanistic Psychology. Encyclopedia Britannica .
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• Winston CN. Points of Convergence and Divergence Between Existential and Humanistic Psychology: A Few Observations. The Humanistic Psychologist . 2015.
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