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| Chapter 13: Experience, Existence, and the Meaning of Life: Humanistic Psychology |
- Humanistic psychology concentrates on the ways that studying humans differs from studying objects or animals, including such issues as experience, awareness, and free will.
- Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory in an attempt to formulate a phenomenological science that would describe all the elements of experience.
- Phenomenology is closely related to the philosophical school called existentialism, which breaks experience into three types (experience of the external world, social experience, and introspective experience-of-experiencing). Existentialism also claims that existence has no meaning beyond what each person gives it.
- Existential philosophers such as Sartre concluded that a failure to face life's lack of inherent meaning constitutes living in bad faith.
- The phenomenological perspective also implies that the present moment of experience is all that matters, which means that individuals have free will and that the only way to understand another person is to understand his or her experience of the world.
- Modern humanist psychologists added to this existential analysis the assumption that people are basically good and inherently motivated to self-actualize.
- Rogers and Maslow asserted that a person who faces experience directly can become a fully functioning person; Rogers believed this outcome could only occur for individuals who had received unconditional positive regard from the important people in their lives. Maslow believed that higher needs such as self-actualization could come to the fore only after more basic needs related to survival and security became satisfied.
- Kelly's personal construct theory says that each person's experience of the world is organized by his or her unique set of personal constructs, or themes. Scientific paradigms have much in common with these personal constructs.
- Csikszentmihalyi's theory says that the best state of existence is flow, in which challenges and capabilities are balanced.
- Maddi argues that people should develop a hardy lifestyle by embracing life's challenges rather than avoiding all stress.
- Positive psychology, a recent development, may represent a rebirth of humanistic psychology, focusing on the traits and psychological processes that promote well-being and give life meaning.
- An important contribution of positive psychology is its attempt to catalog universal human virtues, which research suggests include justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence. A sixth core virtue, courage, appears to be slightly less universal.
- The two main contributions of humanistic psychology's phenomenological approach are the attempt to address the mystery of human experience and its emphasis on nonjudgmental understanding of individuals and cultures.
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