Humanistic Psychology

Current Trends and Future Prospects

Richard House, David Kalisch, Jennifer Maidman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315392929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a thought-provoking examination of the present state and the future of Humanistic Psychology, showcasing a rich international contributor line-up.

The book addresses head-on the current state of a world in crisis, not only placing the current conjuncture within a wider evolutionary context, but also demonstrating the specifically humanistic-psychological values and practices that can help us to transform and transcend the world's current challenges. Each chapter looks in depth at a variety of issues: counselling and psychotherapy, creativity and the humanities, post-traumatic stress, and socio-political movements and activism.

The book amply confirms that Humanistic Psychology is as alive, and as innovative and exciting, as it ever has been, and has tremendous relevance to the uncertainties that characterize the unprecedented individual and global challenges of the times. It celebrates the diverse and continuing significance of Humanistic Psychology by providing a robust and reliable roadmap for a new generation of counsellors and psychotherapists. In these richly diverse chapters will be found inspiration, pockets of resistance, mature critical reflexivity and much much more - a book accurately reflecting our present situation, and which is an invaluable addition to the psychology literature.

PART I
History and contexts

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO PART I

Richard House, David Kalisch and Jennifer Maidman

Humanistic Psychology tends to be forward-looking rather than past-focused, but in order to understand and locate its current state and future possibilities, it is important to connect with our roots and examine the historical trajectory of the humanistic project within psychology and the psychological therapies. In their keynote opening chapter, respected elders of Britain’s Humanistic Psychology movement John Rowan and Dina (Zohar) Glouberman pose the fundamental question ‘What is Humanistic Psychology?’, casting light on some of the core principles and values underpinning psychology’s ‘Third Force’, and exploring the historical background and some of the key events associated with the evolution of the humanistic approach.

In Chapter 2 on ‘Creativity in the evolution of Humanistic Psychology’, Louis Hoffman, Ruth Richards and Steven Pritzker look at the place of creativity as an important emergent theme within humanistic writing, with particular reference to its relevance for theory, research and practice. The authors also seek creatively to engage Humanistic Psychology to move beyond simply retelling the same, familiar stories and narratives, in the process setting out some exciting new areas for development, and offering practical suggestions for increasing creativity’s presence and influence in the field.

In a typically sharply argued third chapter, Colin Feltham then considers Humanistic Psychology’s past and future. Feltham declares his personal sympathy with aspects of Humanistic Psychology, considering its strengths and critiquing what he sees as its weaknesses – namely, its lack of realism, lack of engagement with contemporary, harsh socio-economic realities, and the extent to which it might have failed to live up to its early promise. Feltham considers whether Humanistic Psychology might, in time, become a barely significant set of nostalgic theories and practices, or whether it might yet find ways to bring its important focuses on birth, education, feelings, spirituality and patriarchal civilization to a new readership and public. Colin Feltham is one of several ‘critical friends’ of Humanistic Psychology represented in the book, and the cogency, openness and integrity of his contribution constitute an admirable model for anyone aspiring to deepen our critical reflexivity, and constructively to challenge our taken-for-granted humanistic assumptions.

Finally in Part 1, Seamus Nash looks in Chapter 4 at the place of person-centred counselling in Humanistic Psychology, drawing on his doctoral research to focus on what precisely person/client-centred practitioners mean when they use the terms ‘person-centred’ and ‘client-centred’ to describe their therapeutic work, and how they perceive their own practice. In attempting to understand what it is like to be a person/client-centred therapist, and in mapping what practitioners understand to be their espoused theory, what the theory means to them personally, and what are the main elements of this theory that they operationalize in their practice, Nash provides an admirable model for locating and interrogating this core therapeutic approach within the wider context of humanistic therapy praxis.

Taken together, these four positioning chapters provide a fitting and authoritative backdrop for our subsequent foray into the rich and diverse dimensions of the field, in all its variegated and untamed breadth and depth. Certainly, it is vitally important that as the elders of Humanistic Psychology age and pass on, the extraordinary and daring history of the movement is faithfully recorded, both for posterity and the History of Ideas, and also for a younger generation currently showing a welcome upsurge in the principled idealism and passion for social justice that fuelled Humanistic Psychology in its formative period. The ‘Roots and History of Humanistic Psychology’ occasional series in the humanistic journal Self & Society is just one way in which this vital history of the movement is being documented for those who will follow and keep the flame alive.

1
WHAT IS HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY?

John Rowan and Dina Glouberman

Humanistic Psychology is a psychological perspective that rose to prominence in the mid-20th century partly as a response to the limitations of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and B. F. Skinner’s behaviourism. Considered a ‘third force’, this approach emphasized individuals’ inherent drive toward self-actualization, the process of realizing and expressing one’s own capabilities and creativity. It moved away from a medical model to a democratic and holistic one, based on fostering communication, creativity, and personal development throughout life for everyone.

Some of the underlying assumptions were that we are constantly evolving beings, that we need to take a holistic approach to being human which is an integration of the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual, that self-exploration, creativity, free will, authenticity, and positive human potential were important for everyone, and that self-development could be done in an essentially democratic way through self-exploration and group work as much as through professional consultation.

Humanistic Psychology was an important part of a worldwide surge of interest in what human beings could be and could become, which started in the 1940s, grew slowly in the 1950s, grew much faster in the 60s and finally reached its full flowering in the 1970s. Today it is consolidating itself, and becoming much more widely accepted.

In the process of change and development, a number of different names and titles have been used for this humanistic approach. Sometimes it has been called ‘third force psychology’; sometimes the ‘self-awareness movement’ (because awareness seemed to be quite a key word); sometimes the ‘human potential movement’ (because of its insistence that the average and the normal are actually less than average and less than normal); and sometimes just ‘personal growth’, because of its belief that people could continue to grow beyond their usual limits, if they were allowed to. Today it is less of a movement and more of a tendency or approach within the whole field of self-development. The full story can be followed in books such as de Carvalho (1991), Moss (1999), Rowan (2001) and Whitton (2003).

In the early days, one man was the pioneer of this way of looking at the world: Abraham Maslow. He was an academic psychologist who later became president of the American Psychological Association. He put forward the key idea of self-actualization: the idea that our purpose in life is to go on with a process of development that starts out in early life but which often gets blocked later (Maslow 1987). He was joined by others such as Carl Rogers (another president of the APA), Charlotte Buhler, Roberto Assagioli, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Kurt Goldstein, Sidney Jourard, Rollo May, Clark Moustakas, Ira Progoff, Jean Houston, Alvin Mahrer and others. Although Humanistic Psychology is sometimes seen as synonymous with the work of Maslow and Rogers, all of these thinkers and clinicians contributed to the full development of the humanistic approach.

One of the most characteristic features of this approach is that it lays a great deal of stress upon personal experience: it is not enough to read about it in books. This personal experience did not need to happen in a professional setting of the therapist/patient relationship, but rather could happen in groups and communities which were essentially democratic and where people could be authentically themselves.

To this end, a number of different methods emerged including Psychodrama, Gestalt, Encounter, Breathwork and Dance Therapy, which helped people in a group or community become intimate and open with each other quickly, and to explore issues in more dramatic ways. These methods tended to utilize movement, drama, imagination, and other verbal and non-verbal ways to open up, shed light upon, and often resolve issues that had not responded to highly professionalized and verbally based therapies such as psychoanalysis.

Open and honest communication was considered key to creating honest, loving and essentially democratic groups that could be a crucible for healthy personal development and transformation.

And so this movement produced a unique kind of institution which had never existed before – the growth centre. A growth centre is a place where you can go and be encouraged to meet other people and meet yourself. This idea of meeting yourself is unique. No one had ever talked about that before, except in a rather forbidding way connected with illness or personal problems, or perhaps as part of a religious group.

But the growth centre is for everyone who feels that there is more – there does not have to be anything wrong with them. And there they find an encouraging environment. If you go to one, you will find yourself in an atmosphere that enables you to open up and trust the situation enough so that you can move forward – maybe even sometimes leap forward – in self-understanding and human relationships. It is open to all – you do not have to be sick or troubled in order to go. In the USA the Esalen Institute (www.esalen.org) and the New York Open Center (www.opencenter.org) among others are still going, and so is the Open Centre (www.opencentre.com) in England and the Skyros Centre (www.skyros.com)in Greece.

In the year 2000 there was a big humanistic conference, called Old Saybrook 2, and this led to a bursting forth of new books and new thinking about the humanistic approach. The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology (2nd edition 2015) put together 800 pages of new thinking covering vast ranges of the psychological landscape; the Handbook of Action Research (Reason & Bradbury, 2001) is not entirely humanistic, but does include important humanistic and transpersonal material; Humanistic Psychotherapies (Cain & Serlin, 2002) comprised another 700 pages of research and practice.

Theory in Humanistic Psychology

Because all the pioneers of Humanistic Psychology were very individual people, there is no one single accepted theory that we can lay out and say – this is it. But there are some very consistent themes running through all the material put forward by the people mentioned above.

The first is that, deep down underneath it all where it really counts, you are OK. This goes against many other and much older theories which say that people are fundamentally bad, selfish, narrow and nasty. By saying that people are fundamentally OK, we do not at all mean that people are not sometimes destructive, or that there is no evil in the world. What we mean is that if someone will agree to work with us on his or her destructive actions or evil wishes, in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance, that person will discover that the evil and destructiveness are just as phoney and just as forgettable as the false niceness of other people, which apparently causes no problems.

In other words, we believe that personal nastiness and personal niceness are most often, in both cases, masks and illusions, put on for reasons that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword to the new edition
• Foreword to the first edition
• Acknowledgements and Dedications
• Editorial Introduction
• Part I History And Contexts
• Part II Scio-political-cultural perspectives
• Part III Socio-political-cultural perspectives
• Part IV Future prospects – existential, transpersonal, postmodern
• Editorial conclusion
• Index