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Psychology: Six Perspectives

Humanistic Psychology

By: Dodge Fernald

Book Title: Psychology: Six Perspectives

Chapter Title: "Humanistic Psychology"

Pub. Date: 2008

Access Date: November 3, 2022

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412938679

Online ISBN: 9781452224862

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n6

Print pages: 175-215

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online

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Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic psychology

• Rise of Humanistic Psychology ◦ Rogers and Growth Potential ◦ Protest of the Third Force

• Three Human Characteristics ◦ Subjectivity: The Basic Reality ◦ Individuality and Self Theory ◦ The Capacity for Growth

• Influence of Early Experience ◦ Conditions of Worth ◦ Congruence and Incongruence

• Philosophical and Practical Issues ◦ The Question of Free Will ◦ Existentialism in Daily Life ◦ Toward a Positive Psychology

• Person-Centered Therapy ◦ A Growth-Inducing Environment ◦ Facilitating Self-Exploration

• Commentary and Critique

Humanistic psychology offers an optimistic outlook on the human condition. Its popularity arises substantially from its emphasis on our inborn potential for favorable growth. If not obstructed by the environment, this capacity emerges in the choices people make for achieving fulfillment in day-to-day living. Under appropriate therapeutic conditions, it also engenders self-healing and recovery from psychological problems. In the best and worst of times, human beings possess an inborn capacity for growth and fulfillment.

After surveying the origins of humanistic psychology, this chapter turns to three characteristics of being human; then it examines selected concepts about early experience in human life; and later it addresses philosophical and practical issues. Collectively, these discussions show how humanistic psychology stands apart from mainstream psychology. It includes nomothetic interests but concentrates prominently on the individual human being, sometimes from the viewpoint of that person's experience. This focus on the individual and on subjectivity holds true in humanistic therapy as well, a discussion that appears before the closing commentary and critique of this perspective.

With these concerns, humanistic psychology presents an open approach to psychological questions, often addressing unusual case studies and elusive concepts that are difficult to operationalize. In a case study of Bertha, for example, her feelings about leadership and its accompanying loneliness would be of special interest. For such purposes, humanistic psychology employs qualitative data and interpretive analyses, especially when studying the subjective elements in human life.

After more than a decade at the orphanage, the subjective side of life suddenly changed for Bertha. She had been living only with her mother, taking full responsibility for aged Recha, providing extensive physical and emotional support. Then Recha died, and Bertha found herself totally alone. Living with no family, no partner, and no friends, all by herself on evenings, weekends, and holidays, she wrote in her journal that she felt almost like a different person.

When her father died, she experienced hallucinations, distorted thinking, and loss of body functions. Then she stayed in bed. Older and wiser when her mother died, she continued at work but fell into a different sort of depression, discouraged by other peoples' lives as well as her own (Edinger, 1968). Encountering day after day the unhealthy, unhappy, uneducated daughters of deprived women, she was deeply dismayed by these girls' dim prospects, despite her extensive efforts on their behalf. And she pondered the sad outlook for the countless thousands who would never experience the slightest benefits from her orphanage. Confronted with

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their plight and her own loneliness, Bertha struggled with feelings of despair.

The feeling side of life is a basic concern for human beings—men and women, young and old, wealthy and indigent. And it is a centerpiece of humanistic psychology.

Rise of Humanistic Psychology

As its name suggests, humanistic psychology focuses on human beings, apart from other creatures, and it does so with a distinctly optimistic outlook, emphasizing three characteristics of human uniqueness: subjectivity, individuality, and the capacity for growth. In this context, it points to human beings' substantial inner resources for self-regulation, thereby proposing an element of free will. A departure from the prior perspectives and intentionally closer to the humanities than to natural sciences, it is more philosophical, more focused on feelings, and less scientific and systematic. In other words, it is a statement about interpersonal relations and moral values in the context of human development, reminding mainstream psychology about these often ignored issues (Mandler, 1985).

In its first years, humanistic psychology raised the prospect of organizing the whole field of psychology around a more integrated conception of the person, stressing the experiencing individual. Further, it suggested that Western universities seek a closer dialogue between the sciences and the humanities (O'Hara & Taylor, 2000).

The early stages of this interest emerged with the clinical work of Carl Rogers (1902–1987). He emphasized the human potential for growth, as well as the feeling side of life. Later, Abraham Maslow promoted growth potential and also a framework for studying the levels of growth. With these early roots, humanistic psychologists have continued to devote extensive efforts to the practice of psychology within and outside the clinic. This focus on feelings, the individual, and fulfillment has taken precedence over the more objective, statistically oriented studies of groups of people pursued in mainstream psychology.

Rogers and Growth Potential

Rogers' parents raised their children with strong religious beliefs, which were thoroughly ingrained into their home life. So powerful was this upbringing that the children knew which behaviors were acceptable and unacceptable even without direct instruction from their parents. It had a lasting effect on Rogers' career and thus on the development of humanistic psychology.

Holding a deep conviction about the virtue of hard work, Rogers' parents moved to a farm in Illinois before he reached adolescence. This life removed their children from temptations of the city and offered opportunities for meaningful employment that were unavailable to many teenagers. Each day young Carl Rogers did chores, rising at 5:00 a.m. to milk a dozen cows. After school, he milked them again and attended to the farmyard pigs. His mind stayed awake in school but not the rest of his body. Twice-a-day milking apparently demanded too much of his arms and hands; they constantly fell “asleep” during class (Rogers, 1967).

With his schoolwork, farm chores, and religious restrictions, Rogers had no social life outside his family. But all that changed. When he went away to college and then toured foreign lands, he found himself thinking his own thoughts, taking his own stands on issues, and arriving at his own conclusions. This issue, freedom versus control, eventually pervaded his whole outlook on life, including his humanistic approach to psychology.

Decades later, as a clinical psychologist working with people in the back wards of mental hospitals, he thought about some potatoes in his boyhood cellar. Lying one winter in a pile in that dark basement, well below one small window, their growth inspired his metaphor for humanistic psychology. Despite these highly unfavorable conditions, the potatoes grew anyway, sending out spindly white sprouts, sometimes two or three feet long. They grew toward the light from that distant window, producing distorted versions of the healthy green shoots that potatoes grow in warm spring soil. These sprouts were a desperate version of an innate but, in this case, futile growth tendency. They would never realize their full potential; they would never become plants. But as an expression of the actualizing tendency, they were striving to become so, even under the most adverse

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conditions (Rogers, 1980).

This striving, for Rogers, showed an inborn growth process in all living organisms, a directional tendency that cannot be destroyed except by destroying the organism itself. Whether the environment is favorable or adverse, whether the entity is a worm, a potato, or a person, this life force acts in the direction of maintenance, enhancement, and reproduction. It is an automatic striving in life. Rogers broke away from psychoanalysis on this issue. Every individual, not the therapist, has the capacity to guide his or her own development.

Viewing people in those back wards, Rogers thought of their scarcely human conditions, and yet he perceived in them this directional tendency that could be trusted. In fact, the key to understanding their behavior and assisting them lay in recognizing that they were attempting to grow in the only ways they saw available at that time. Their efforts were life's desperate attempts to fulfill itself. For Rogers and his followers, a tendency toward fulfillment, most evident in human beings, exists in all living creatures, ill and healthy (Rogers, 1980). Later, in university environments, he found confirmation for this view.

Known as the actualizing tendency, this capacity for growth is a life force, an inborn predisposition to seek the fullest expression of one's abilities and thereby achieve meaningful goals. Barring insurmountable external obstacles, it enables an individual to realize his or her potential. This actualizing tendency appears at the core of humanistic psychology, marking this perspective as distinctly different from its immediate predecessors.

Protest of the Third Force

Occasionally called Third Force, humanistic psychology arose as a protest against both its immediate predecessors, psychoanalysis and behaviorism. In the 1950s, those perspectives were viewed by some psychologists as too controlling, too deterministic amid the optimism and concern for freedom arising in psychology, as well as among the public. As the first force, psychoanalysis stressed the unconscious influences in mental life that control behavior in ways we cannot comprehend. Behaviorism, the second force, emphasized that environmental factors control behavior, largely through their consequences. Opposing both positions, humanistic psychology stressed that human beings can make their own, appropriate choices in life, thereby leading meaningful lives and encountering fulfilling experiences.

As the Third Force began to expand, it included related movements and, indeed, almost anyone in American psychology who resisted the growing emphasis on large-scale statistical studies. Employing group data, those studies ignored or obscured the uniqueness of their participants. In opposition, the Third Force coalition encouraged a focus on the development of each person as a complex integration of inseparable parts. Sharing this ambitious goal, humanistic psychology has not become a highly integrated psychological perspective, especially in the manner of psychoanalysis and behaviorism, which are organized around the core concepts of unconscious mental processes and the reinforcement principle, respectively. Rather, humanistic psychology addresses numerous related, less measurable concepts: subjective experience, the actualizing tendency, congruence and incongruence, and conditions of worth.

Humanistic psychology did not displace psychoanalysis, which still has wide appeal in the public domain and stimulates research in child development and unconscious cognitive processes. With its fewer empirical findings, it did not displace behaviorism, which continues today with specialized research and specific applications in everyday life. Instead, humanistic psychology has existed on the periphery of academic psychology, flourishing with the many practical applications of its approach to therapy while at the same time retaining its comparatively loose structure.

Less directly, the humanistic movement resisted the premises in biological psychology, which reduced explanations of psychological phenomena to physiological processes. When searching outside its borders, humanistic psychology looks instead to philosophical and related literatures, which examine human experience in broader terms.

To investigate the topics of personal growth, feelings, and meanings in life, humanistic psychologists sometimes turn to phenomenology, studying nature according to how things seem to the observer, rather than what they may be objectively. The intention is to suspend all everyday interpretations and explanations

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insofar as possible, concentrating more on the mental experience and less on the observed object or event. Perceiving a flower, phenomenological observers, in their imaginations, may vary different characteristics of the flower and even different ways of visually apprehending it, striving to experience the essence of the flower or the essence of seeing the flower. More philosophical than psychological, phenomenology aims to ignore the antecedents and consequences surrounding sensation and perception. Instead, the elusive goal becomes a direct investigation of consciousness, free of preconceived notions.

This divergence in the pathways of scientific and humanistic psychology reflects a difference in the ways of knowing in the humanities and sciences. Both approaches recognize that no one can become a completely objective, detached observer; everyone necessarily functions as a participant observer. Phenomenology focuses on the individual's experience. Scientific psychology may do so too. But, more importantly, it also focuses on the ways in which specific circumstances influence that experience. In other words, mainstream psychology also studies the causality in human experience.

The humanistic research methods are largely descriptive: case studies, as well as surveys and naturalistic observation. The data are commonly qualitative, reflecting themes in peoples' speech and behavior. Topics of popular inquiry include the self, changes in awareness, and personal experience. The practical interests, usually clinical, outweigh formal research activity.

A case study of Bertha's struggle with mental illness cited a cluster of factors that produced the problem in Vienna: the childhood deaths of two sisters, the prolonged and fatal illness of her father, overcontrol by her mother, conflict with Wilhelm, and sociocultural restrictions that prevented her self-expression. It then pointed to circumstances in Frankfurt favorable to her recuperation: the extended-family support, thriving Jewish community, opportunities for charity work, and rising tide of feminism. It also noted personal factors: Bertha's will, evident in her early struggles with Wilhelm; her capacity for writing and speaking effectively; and her wealth, which lifted a huge burden from Bertha and freed her from the drudgery of making a living. In fact, it offered the opportunity to live in luxury and, at the same time, to develop altruistic projects by using her own money as well as that of her relatives (Kimball, 2000).

As this report illustrates, humanistic psychology commonly studies the person, not people. Investigations of groups obscure the individual amid group data. Even the group average does not depict a specific individual. In fact it may not represent anyone at all in the group.

One classic case study focused on a five-year-old boy who was mute and disruptive in school. Dibs crawled around the floor, displayed violent temper tantrums, and for extended periods sat without speaking. Judging him to be mentally disturbed, his parents brought him to a humanistically oriented child therapist, and she assisted this little boy in his “search for self.” In doing so, she showed respect for the growth potential in human beings; she allowed Dibs to find his own way in therapy by using toys, playing imaginary games, and speaking without fear of reprisal. After months of steady therapy, he revealed himself to be a highly intelligent child who found much greater security in the world around him (Axline, 1964). This early, detailed analysis of one little boy did much to augment interest in humanistic psychology and its therapy.

This special concern for the individual and for personal experience sets humanistic psychology apart from other perspectives. Humanistic psychologists, and also practitioners from the other viewpoints, tend toward idiographic inquiry—seeking, for example, to understand Bertha as a particular individual with her own special thoughts, genetic background, and personal history. Like all of us, she was different from everyone else.

During the gloomy days after her mother's death, she organized a small feminist group in Frankfurt called Care by Women. It benefited the staff, needy recipients, and presumably its founder too. This activity foreshadowed Bertha's later career in the public sector. Perhaps it was her loneliness or maybe her new freedom from family responsibilities; in any case, Bertha made a significant personal decision. She moved to a smaller apartment on Praunheimerstrasse, which brought her closer to cousin Louise Goldschmidt and into a more modest style of living. No longer would she work with the poor during the day and then return to her mother's large and lavish quarters in the evening. Maybe this “downsizing” would bring greater harmony into her life.

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She brought to this apartment most of her parents' elegant furnishings and her own art objects: glassware, paintings, figurines, wood-carved clocks, and the “comforter” cabinet. They became reminders that both her parents and those earlier days were gone.

Three Human Characteristics

Each of us possesses certain inherited characteristics and, based on our personal history, certain acquired characteristics too. Moreover, we all exist in a certain time and place, different from all others in the universe. How do we express and experience our uniqueness as individual human beings? Humanistic psychology addresses this question.

In the humanistic view, all people everywhere possess three fundamental characteristics: subjectivity, individuality, and the capacity for growth (Rogers, 1951). They form the core of humanity, with the first two setting us apart from other species.

This concern with subjectivity cuts two ways, however. It creates for the humanistic approach a unique place in psychology, pointing out that behavior can be most successfully understood by adopting the viewpoint of the responding individual, not from an external viewpoint. But it also calls forth criticism, even ostracism, from some areas of scientific psychology. In adopting this approach, shared fully by no other perspective, it stands at odds with modern science, which typically insists on objectivity—the investigation of publicly repeatable, verifiable events, not private experience.

Subjectivity: The Basic Reality

The doctrine of subjectivity states that the study of personal, private experience is the most meaningful approach to understanding human beings. Knowing Bertha requires an understanding of her inner states, her feelings at a given moment. Human beings are sensitive creatures; they are feeling creatures. The inner dimension of human life is a crucial determinant of behavior.

Similarly, Josef Breuer, Willie, and others in Bertha's life were sensitive, feeling individuals. Breuer experienced growing feelings of affection for Bertha during their sessions together, and then he became fearful of the consequences of those feelings. Brother Willie regularly experienced feelings of anger toward his sister, on one occasion shaking her so violently that Bertha could not forget the incident. And both of Bertha's parents became anxious about their daughter when she fell into her “absences.” They had good reason to worry; they remained acutely aware of the early deaths of their other daughters.

In some areas of modern psychology, the study of feelings and private experience has been regarded as a doubtful enterprise. Thus, humanistic psychologists have been viewed as contrarians in the world of science, sacrificing the precision potentially available in other research. But diverse proponents are attracted to this descriptive outlook. For them, the tradeoff is clearly worthwhile, justified by the gain in understanding a particular individual.

Humanistic interests in subjectivity appeared in a 25-year follow-up study of 10 highly creative women, selected from 400 girls attending public high schools in New York City a quarter-century earlier. As adolescents, they possessed a high potential for creativity, according to teachers' nominations and their creative products (Anastasi & Schaefer, 1969). In the follow-up study, they completed an extensive, essay- type inventory designed to assess creative processes. The results reflected their diverse backgrounds, but one characteristic emerged as ascendant for 9 of the 10 participants: the need to understand one's subjective reality. Motivated to examine their own inner worlds, these women used creativity in the arts as their pathway. As one participant explained, her own sense of a particular scene, even as a photographer, held more interest for her than the real-life story framed by her camera (Cangelosi & Schaefer, 1992).

This research, based on essays by 10 women, raises questions about the value of introspective data, the small sample of participants, and lack of a comparison group. But for humanistic psychologists, to ignore subjectivity is to ignore a basic dimension of human life.

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Humanistic psychology emphasizes the individual's experience of external events, not the events per se or the view of some other observer. External reality of course is recognized, but it is considered of secondary importance. Humanistic psychologists stress that the reactions of all living beings are determined by the ways they interpret events, not by the objective, physical properties of those events as measured by conventional methods in the natural sciences.

Bertha's reaction to her mother's death was determined by the way she saw her mother, whether or not, as some claimed, her mother actually was “something of a dragon” (Jones, 1953). Bertha's sadness and lethargy can be understood only by looking through her eyes. To become more effective as a science, according to the humanistic view, psychology must develop more systematic research methods for examining and understanding personal experience.

In the dark hours of her depression, Bertha re-examined her experiences as an adult. Her twenties had been torturous years. Her thirties had been satisfying; she found a place in society. Now in her forties, she had no close ties with anyone, family or friends. She was alone—and free. Not free to do whatever she wanted but free to make her own decisions.

“The less I have to do, the more I have to be,” she complained. To escape her despair, she lost herself in work, thinking less about herself, feeling less lonely and confused (Edinger, 1968).

Individuality and Self Theory

Bertha's efforts to stop thinking about herself point to the second major dimension of human uniqueness. This dimension, individuality, concerns the countless ways in which human beings and animals of the same species differ from one another—physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, and so forth. Each of us is different from all other people on earth. The remark of a homespun carpenter greatly impressed William James in this regard. There is only a small difference between one person and the next, he observed, but that small difference is mighty important (James, 1890).

One of James's students, Gordon Allport, a major figure in the study of personality, ventured one step further, concluding that all normal vertebrate animals on earth differ less from one another in psychological complexity and functioning than does one human being from another (Allport, 1962). On this basis, a robin and a whale differ less in psychological functioning than do a pair of human brothers, sisters, even twins, or any other human beings. This conjecture emphasizes that human psychological functioning normally occurs at a vastly higher level of complexity than that in all infra-human species (Fernald, 1995).

The result, human individuality, becomes most evident within a framework for studying the whole person in a broad context, one that emphasizes a narrative approach. In a self-narrative, people construct life stories about themselves, sometimes in response to certain questions, as a way of achieving a clearer identity and enlarging the meaning of their lives. Based on past and imagined future events, these efforts at self- understanding also can generate an increased sense of continuity and purpose. And they can serve as a framework or background for personality psychologists interested in the study of the individual (McAdams & Pals, 2006).

These persistent reflections about ourselves and our complexity occupy a central position in self theory, which states that all human beings have many different views of themselves—physical, social, emotional, and so forth. These views can vary markedly from situation to situation, and they exert a pronounced influence on behavior (Rogers, 1989). According to humanistic psychology, any study of human behavior that ignores self theory immediately becomes flawed. William James once observed that we have as many different selves as we have people who know us well (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Multiple Selves and Personal Identity. A college student wrote separately to his mother, girlfriend, and coach about a dispute with a teammate, presenting himself somewhat differently in each instance.

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According to self theory, the “real” student is a composite of these different selves. The double-headed arrows suggest that all people construct their identities partly through multiple selves

But of course the self itself defies simple definition. A major handbook identifies five ways in which scientists use the term and notes eight uses among philosophers. It defines the self as an organism's capacity for reflexive consciousness—to think about oneself (Leary & Tangney, 2003). In primate laboratories, an animal's sense of self is sometimes tested by spraying a bit of washable color into the hair on its head. If the animal, on observing itself in a mirror, tends to stroke or explore that body part in particular, that behavior suggests an awareness of the physical self.

The human newborn apparently has no sense of self—no sense of “me” and “not me.” Through interactions with the environment, especially the parents, she begins to develop a sense of “self” and “other” and then to differentiate various parts of her self and her world. She acquires various selves and also a more global, stable sense of self, called the self-concept, which includes all the ideas, feelings, and perceptions recognized as me, I, or myself (Rogers, 1951). In humanistic psychology, the self-concept is considered the most useful perspective for understanding an individual (Epstein, 1973).

Psychologists commonly use rating scales and inventories to assess the self-concept and related selves. In one traditional method, the person receives a deck of 100 cards, each describing some personal characteristic such as “Has warmth,” “Is moralistic,” and “Keeps people at a distance.” In this technique, called the Q-sort, the individual sorts all the cards according to the number required in each of nine categories. Most cards must be placed in the middle categories and only a few at the extremes, identified as the “least like” and “most like” categories (Block, 1961). The person's distribution becomes a narrative self-description, however accurate or distorted. In addition, each statement can be assigned a weighted score based on its placement in the various categories. When all scores are combined, this distribution produces an overall numerical expression of the self-concept.

In Vienna, Bertha's self-concept was that of a bright but frustrated young woman who was confused by mixed feelings toward her family, inadequate relations with the opposite sex, and pervasive gender discrimination. In

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Frankfurt, as an older woman in a more liberal society, her self-concept centered around her work, as it does for many adults. Responsible for the success of the whole orphanage, she viewed herself as an intelligent, decisive administrator, altruistic in spirit, and privately quite lonely—especially after the death of her mother.

At this point, she made a second fundamental decision, one that cut even more deeply into her everyday life. It represented a major change in the ways she thought about herself, and it altered her career and life plan. For years, she had heard stories of atrocities in Galicia, an eastern region of Austria. Poverty produced such desperate conditions that girls and women from the ghettos were lured or sold into prostitution. A slave market stretched from Turkey through Germany to South America. In Frankfurt, the railway served as a relay, transporting the captives to houses of prostitution all over the world.

Bertha began to think about protecting young prostitutes, as well as unmarried mothers and their babies. That goal permeated her thoughts about her own future, the self she sought to realize. Called the ideal self, it consists of the standards of excellence prescribed for oneself. It plays an important role in integrating and unifying the individual's behavior. In a general sense, the ideal self is the self-concept that an individual wants to attain.

The difference between the self-concept and the ideal self involves a time factor, the present and the future. The self-concept represents a person's current sense of self, the way she regards herself at that moment. The ideal self represents the person she would like to become, the way she hopes to be at some later date. Bertha imagined her future self in a new way—not as someone responsible for the care of children but as a freedom fighter, as someone standing at the front line against social injustice. One's work not only forms a major part of the self-concept; it also contributes to the development of the ideal self.

With these thoughts, and after 12 years of service, she resigned from the orphanage—but not from her calling. She sought higher ground—a home for unwed mothers. In serving soup to refugees and directing the orphanage, Bertha had broken with upper-class tradition. This new plan broke with deeper social norms. In her day, unwed mothers deserved punishment, not protection.

Speculating in the context of self theory, a gap existed between Bertha's self-concept and ideal self, which is not unusual. But that gap had recently widened. Her self-concept included a general sense of competence and well-being in the orphanage. Her ideal self had advanced to assisting disgraced women, rejected by society.

This gap between the self-concept and ideal self is known as self-esteem, which is an overall evaluation of oneself. A value judgment is involved, ranging from low to high. Self-esteem correlates in a limited way with the self-concept, which also can vary from negative to positive. But the self-concept is much broader, more complex, and described by such additional dimensions as stability, diversity, maturity, and especially one's roles in life. In contrast, self-esteem is described simply as a matter of degree, ranging from low to high.

Bertha clearly had higher self-esteem as director of the orphanage than as Breuer's patient in Vienna. Sheltering women from prostitution could provide another boost, as well as an opportunity for personal growth.

The Capacity for Growth

A capacity for growth is the third dimension of human uniqueness, following subjectivity and individuality. As noted already, it refers to a tendency in all living creatures to use and develop their faculties to the fullest. Most pronounced in human beings, formally known as the actualizing tendency, this energy is an innate impetus to achieve useful, meaningful goals. Involving the whole person, it promotes the constructive expression of all inherent capacities, if it is not blocked by external circumstances (Rogers, 1980).

This striving to realize one's full potential, Rogers declared, is the fundamental force in every living creature. It can even alleviate maladjustment. In inborn, automatic ways, it predisposes the individual toward recovery and greater satisfaction in life. It prompts people to engage in activities that are right for them as individuals. These activities yield the greatest satisfaction and productivity. But as a rule people do not advance to this

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level without progressing through earlier, less fulfilling stages.

Named after Abraham Maslow, who first described it, this series of stages is called Maslow's motivational hierarchy because it depicts a sequence of motives that guide human behavior according to a certain order. At different times in life, people find themselves at different stages of the hierarchy. But Maslow decided that most people do not reach self-actualization, the highest level (Maslow, 1970).

Our various physiological motives, at the bottom of this hierarchy, involve the need for food, water, oxygen, and other elements necessary for life. When these motives are not minimally satisfied, an individual becomes almost exclusively concerned with them.

The refugees arrived at the soup kitchen close to this level. But through the meals served there, the immediate threat of starvation no longer dominated their lives. On this basis, according to the theory, many advanced to the next level, where another set of motives becomes ascendant.

In the safety motives, an individual seeks shelter and protection from natural disasters and predators. Safety motives include freedom from harm, intentional or otherwise, and they become important after the physiological motives have been met. With certain exceptions, human beings seek safe, stable circumstances.

Together, the physiological and safety motives are sometimes called the biological motives. If they are substantially satisfied, then the individual progresses to a set of psychological motives, concerned with mental well-being, not simply physical satisfaction.

The first psychological level, the motivation for love and belonging, has been fostered by childhood experience, a time when human helplessness requires the support of family, friends, and others. This desire for human company also may have inborn components. In any case, human beings are notably attracted to others of their kind, so much so that the life of a recluse becomes rare and remarkable. Living as a group member, giving and receiving assistance, and enjoying personal relationships are the anticipated modes of life of most people.

But, alas, once love and belonging motives are satisfied, another level emerges. The individual experiences the motivation for self-esteem, defined as a person's desire for a positive evaluation of herself. For example, Bertha wants to think well of herself. How does she rate? Self-esteem is largely the difference between the self-concept and ideal self, but it also emerges from our place and accomplishments in the group. We human beings, T. S. Eliot said, “are engaged in an endless struggle to think well of ourselves.”

Satisfaction of self-esteem motives, according to Maslow, does not end the progression. The individual next seeks a pair of less personal motives. The capacity for growth becomes more evident here in the cognitive motives, stimulating the individual to comprehend interesting experiences. The aim is to know and understand the ordinary and the novel. In contrast, the aesthetic motives stimulate the individual more toward artistic than scientific pursuits. The aim is to appreciate the beauty and orderliness in nature, including the complexity of the human condition.

These cognitive and aesthetic motives may reveal something about the human brain. According to evolutionary theory, the brain evolved to satisfy our biological needs for food, safety, and so forth. But in this process, it became so complex that it developed its own need to be fed. It seeks cognitive and aesthetic stimulation. Solitary confinement, sensory constancy, and other forms of stimulus deprivation are more than unpleasant. They disrupt normal human functioning and well-being.

Cognitive and aesthetic motives, toward the upper levels of the hierarchy, played a prominent role in Bertha's life, more so than for most of her acquaintances. However, she was not fully satisfied at the lower levels of love and belonging and also self-esteem. Maslow stated that the satisfaction of lower motives is usually essential for experience at the upper levels, but exceptions occur. Soldiers risk their lives for comrades, and artists endure semi-starvation to pursue lonely careers.

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The capacity for growth becomes most evident at the highest level. Here the individual seeks to express her talents to the fullest, engaging in useful goals for which she is well suited. At this level, the motivation is called self-actualization, or the self-actualization motive, for the individual pursues whatever constructive activities she is best fitted to do, based on her inborn nature and personal experience. Self-actualization is the fulfillment of drives that transcend basic biological and psychological needs, extending instead to personal abilities and social concerns. Maslow believed that few people reach this level, and if they do, they are unlikely to remain there for lengthy periods. The Mother Teresas, Abraham Lincolns, and Martin Luther Kings of this world are examples of self-actualization, at least for certain periods in their lives (Maslow, 1970). Bertha remains an unlikely candidate, not just statistically but because she rarely seemed at peace with herself, even when engaged in good works.

A person need not be famous or powerful to become self-actualizing. Parents truly interested in their babies and capable of nurturing them to their highest potential can also become self-actualizing. Landscapers who enjoy their work and the fruits of their labors might become self-actualizing. Self-actualization often appears to fulfill personal needs.

During her Viennese childhood, Bertha's growth potential had been blocked, stifled by family restrictions and cultural practices. They prevented the natural expression and elaboration of her talents. In Frankfurt, things were different. Older, more settled, and without these restraints, she pursued personal goals with socially beneficial consequences. The growth tendency perhaps was manifesting itself in this movement toward social activism.

She made progress, obtaining funds from relatives and national organizations and a site in the small town of Neu-Isenburg, six miles from Frankfurt, a half-hour ride by trolley. Only a short distance in miles, Neu-Isenburg was a long way from Frankfurt politically. With its own government, it was far more liberal toward aliens of all sorts, including unwed mothers. Having obtained two acres of land on Zepplinstrasse, Bertha planned the construction of buildings that would blend into the community, enabling her children to move into the mainstream of society as easily and unobtrusively as possible. But she chose a title that made the character and goals of her new institution perfectly clear: The Home for Wayward Girls and Illegitimate Babies.

So here stood Bertha, challenging fundamental beliefs of her society. And she was recruiting others for this work.

From the humanistic viewpoint, honest work of almost any sort provides potential grounds for personal fulfillment. But this tendency toward growth can become manifest in other contexts too. External forces and internalized restrictions may inhibit its expression, but it remains an inborn potential (Rogers, 1980).

On this basis, critics raise questions about the actualizing tendency. With this inborn predisposition toward successful, satisfying experience, why are so many human beings engaged in violent struggles with one another? And why are so many living “lives of quiet desperation”? Humanistic psychologists respond that this potential has been blocked by environmental factors. Critics ask for more solid evidence of the actualizing tendency.

They also resist Maslow's hierarchy on the basis of its egocentric bias. It includes no direct mention of social responsibility. Positive psychology, described later, has been criticized on this same basis. But not Bertha, who went well beyond the usual conventions in her social activism.

The Home opened its doors during the prosperity in Germany before World War I. Prostitutes and new mothers with their babies quickly filled one building; young girls at risk for delinquency inhabited the other. The Home soon became too crowded, and its two buildings became three, the newest a shelter for young children.

Influence of Early Experience

Infancy and childhood are of course the ages of greatest dependency, at least until the last years of a long life. A person at these early stages is essentially helpless, completely dependent far longer than any member

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of another species. During this period, the parents and other caretakers exert an enduring influence, offering or withholding the love and attention so necessary for the child's favorable growth.

Conditions of Worth

In a biological sense, the child requires this loving stimulation; it is essential for optimal physical and social growth (Bowlby, 1965; Harlow & Harlow, 1966). According to self theory, this loving stimulation promotes the actualizing tendency, confirming the child's sense of self. The child understands that she is loved and accepted without reservation. All her thoughts and feelings about herself and others are worthy.

The infant seeks warmth, support, rest, and other experiences that enhance her, including walking, talking, and exploration. She rejects harsh voices, bright lights, sharp touch or pressure, and other sudden intrusions. In the organismic valuing process, or organismic experiencing, the individual knows her preferences and aversions and, in a general way, automatically prefers experiences that enhance the self, biologically and psychologically. The organismic valuing process therefore aids the actualizing tendency, fostering positive growth in particular ways for a particular individual.

Early in life, this process is direct and uncomplicated, based on the outcomes of the infant's experience. But gradually, as the environment becomes more complex, the child's subjective knowing about what's right for her becomes disrupted. By adolescence, she may display uncertainties of all sorts, not knowing which way to turn, even in relatively simple situations. These uncertainties delay or deter healthy choices.

How does the valuing process become disrupted? Why does it cease to function in the healthier, more direct manner evident in the early years?

Human parenting is a lengthy and difficult process, by far the longest and most complex of any species, and the human environment is indeed too complicated for any child. Inevitably, the child's behavior will threaten her own or others' welfare, and then the caretakers must place restrictions on the child. When these restrictions become necessary, communicating unconditional love becomes almost impossible. Effective caretakers indicate to the child that they accept her feelings—her impulse to behave in a certain way—but cannot permit her to endanger herself or others. Even so, offering unconditional love in daily life can be a formidable, overwhelming task. In therapy, it is considered indispensable, but that is a later story.

Instead, most parents impose conditions of worth on the child, just as they do with one another. In conditions of worth, love is withheld or provisional according to the values and standards of the parents or other caretakers. The child receives positive regard only when thinking and feeling in ways consistent with the parents' wishes. She no longer evaluates life in terms of her organismic valuing process. That form of experiencing is rejected or distorted and replaced by others' standards. The child thereby loses touch with her own basic, underlying feelings, a precursor to maladjustment.

Early conditions of worth for Bertha apparently included obedience to parents, denial of sexuality, resignation to having only limited schooling, acceptance of male superiority, and devotion to certain religious scriptures. Detrimental to her sense of self, they impeded her early growth. The organismic valuing process had been subverted.

By adolescence, she had developed a greater capacity to think for herself, reaching her own conclusions about religion, government, and the conditions of women. But these ways of behaving did not meet her parents' or society's expectations. She also had developed the physical capacity for female sexuality, but these experiences were restricted by her family and culture. To cope with these conditions of worth, Bertha resorted first to her private theater and then, involuntarily, to her “absences.” She developed an almost complete separation between her experiences and the external conditions of her life.

Congruence and Incongruence

When a person is raised with conditions of worth—certainly the case for most people—some experiences

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are not incorporated into the self-concept. Even in adult life, the experiences are resisted. They are ignored as irrelevant, or because they are inconsistent with the self-concept, they are incorporated in some distorted manner. When there are only minor discrepancies between a positive self-concept and daily experience, the condition is called congruence, indicating that the individual experiences a harmony, a sense of integration. Everyday experience and the self-concept augment and support one another (Rogers, 1951).

When the discrepancy is large or the self-concept is negative, there is incongruence; an individual's self- concept remains closed to experience or the self-concept is at odds with experience. There is no significant integration. The sense of self and personal experience are incompatible (Rogers, 1951).

A key factor in congruence is the way a person perceives herself in a given situation. The doctrine of subjectivity states that behavior is governed by the phenomena of experience, not by external reality, however objectively defined. A person experiencing congruence is open to life. New experiences are integrated into the personality. In incongruence, they are denied, as happened to Bertha in Vienna and Breuer in working with her.

Initially he was open to this experience. Bertha's massive array of puzzling symptoms came as a surprise to him. Most practitioners of that day would have rejected her case in outright fashion or dismissed it through benign neglect. A few might have attempted, by providing very direct advice, to “talk her out of her symptoms.” Instead, Breuer sat and listened. He did not reject this bewildering experience, saying she was a fool or a faker or bewitched. And he was not threatened initially even though he did not know how to treat her problems. For many hours, he sat and listened.

In self theory, a person open to experience, moving toward congruence, is sometimes called a fully functioning person—in that environment at that particular time. For the individual at that moment, there is no disharmony between the self and experience. The individual remains well aware of his own and others' feelings, thereby sustaining beneficial interpersonal relationships. The fully functioning person represents progress toward congruence—not a permanent state.

Eventually, influenced by his wife's remarks and his own feelings, Breuer experienced this therapy very differently. Falling in love with his patient did not coincide with his view of himself as a loyal and professional person; it did not match his self-concept. Breuer at that point experienced disharmony, or incongruence, and he terminated therapy abruptly. Abandoning therapy in that fashion would be considered highly unprofessional today, but a great deal more is known now about the therapeutic relationship, including countertransference, which created the incongruence for Breuer.

A person experiencing incongruence defends against the realities of that experience, denying or falsifying his feelings. If incongruence extends across several situations, it results in anxiety, and anxiety produces other adjustment disorders. At the very least, the person becomes rigid and inflexible, closed to much of life (Figure 6.2).

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Figure 6.2 Incongruence and Congruence. A student becomes tense when thinking about himself taking a math test. The circles at the left, with little overlap, illustrate the incongruence between his self-concept and that experience. After special instruction, psychotherapy, or some other growth process, congruence increases, illustrated in the largely overlapping circles at the right. His sense of self and experience in a math test are more compatible

Back in Vienna, Bertha had reasons to think of herself as a capable, energetic young woman, and yet she experienced a dull life, finding no opportunity for the expression of these qualities. In Frankfurt, she experienced another form of incongruence—the gap between her self-concept and ideal self. Again, the greater the discrepancy, the greater is the personal discomfort. When that gap became significant, did she leave the orphanage and construct The Home, a goal at odds with prevailing social views?

Incongruence can emerge in any of these ways: through a restricted or distorted self-concept, through a poor match between the self-concept and personal experience, or through a large discrepancy between the self- concept and ideal self. Each of us, according to self theory, evaluates life on these bases.

Bertha's new work presumably reduced this incongruence. She enjoyed the challenge and sometimes seemed a long way from her troubled twenties in Vienna.

Philosophical and Practical Issues

The choices Bertha made in moving to a modest apartment, changing her career, and constructing The Home all raise a longstanding question in psychology, philosophy, and everyday life. To what extent, if any, are human beings autonomous and free, capable of making truly independent choices? Here we confront the controversy between free will and determinism. It becomes relevant because, in contrast to other perspectives, Carl Rogers and humanistic psychology have been more willing to consider this enduring philosophical issue.

Bertha's response to her career and life changes raises a second philosophical issue: her interpretation of these events and indeed of life itself. How did she think about her new freedom, her loneliness, and life's inevitable end? What meaning did they have for her? Existentialism in psychology aims at discovering the ways people search for meaning in their lives.

And finally, a practical issue arises, one with virtually no history. Soon after psychology appeared in American universities, scientists and practitioners became absorbed with studies of disturbed personal adjustment, ranging from poor school performance to serious mental illness. The field continued on this pathway until recently, when a movement in American psychology called for greater attention to the positive side of life.

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Psychology should pursue more studies of subjective well-being and the healthy lifestyle, certainly a vital goal. But the place of this promising movement, called positive psychology, is not yet clear in our new millennium. Its chief goals resemble those of humanistic psychology, and its approach to therapy reflects the cognitive tradition.

The Question of Free Will

Amid her depression, Bertha's change of residence became for her a difficult transition, raising the perplexing question of why she ever left her mother's apartment. What prompted her to abandon the familiar and enter a new neighborhood? In a philosophical sense, this question can be considered from two basic viewpoints: free will and determinism.

The doctrine of free will states that the causes of human behavior lie within the individual; human beings are autonomous. They have the capacity to select among several alternatives and to pursue them without any natural or supernatural constraint. They make and carry out their own decisions. There is within each person no intrinsic necessity to act one way or another. In other words, we are the agents, or authors, of our own actions.

Proponents of this view express surprise that anyone could think otherwise. They know how they feel from one day to the next; they make choices and act in certain ways. They feel successful or unsuccessful, gratified or disappointed at the outcome. They take personal pride in the former outcome; they feel remorseful in the latter. Subjective experience confirms for them on a daily basis a belief in free will.

The notion of free will lies embedded in the most basic fabric of our society. People are responsible for what they do. Those who behave properly receive their just rewards. How could it be otherwise? There are sanctions against people who act in illegal, immoral, or unethical ways. Without individual responsibility, society as we know it would collapse.

The opposed viewpoint, determinism, states that human activity is not free, not under the control of the individual, but instead is influenced by internal and external forces that act on the individual. All events are determined by prior events, thereby excluding the possibility of free choice in human activity. Without this assumption of a lawfulness in nature, there would be little point in science. The current condition of the universe is the result of prior conditions and the cause of future conditions. Everything that happens reflects an inevitable, causal series of events. If scientists could identify all the influential factors, current and past, the future would be entirely predictable.

But scientists cannot do so. Psychological findings therefore become statements of probability, not absolutes.

In daily life and even in psychology, the free will-determinism issue presents little practical significance. Unable to identify the countless causal factors influencing our behavior, most of us experience the feeling of free will. In the meantime, science proceeds on a deterministic basis, seeking to identify causal factors.

For some, this clash between personal experience in daily life and objective analysis in science can be resolved by viewing the almost universal acceptance of free will as an outcome of human evolution. Individuals with that belief became better adapted to the complexities of this world, even in more primitive eras, and therefore more likely than nonbelievers to have survived and passed on this predisposition to future generations. Today, we derive some comfort, confidence, or other support from the notion that we possess a measure of free will. That experience brings some order into our otherwise bewildering environment (Rakos, 2004).

This position raises the question of how we should regard the experience of free will. Is it most usefully considered a force or a feeling? Those who view free will as a force think of the human mind as a causal mechanism in our lives. The individual behaves in a manner essentially independent of other factors. A person who resists taking someone else's money or helps someone across the street seems to experience an internal force or impetus that prevents the stealing or promotes the assistance.

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From the other standpoint, free will is more properly regarded as a feeling, more like an emotion. But it is a special emotion, a feeling of doing something—different from the feeling when something is done to the individual, creating surprise or happiness or some other emotion. In this view, free will is not simply a rational thought either. Instead, the experience somehow occurs in both the mind and body, making our action more intensely experienced than a mere thought alone. On this basis, the experience of free will is an illusion, described as an “authorship emotion” (Wegner, 2002).

Among the critics of this view, one has described free will as a sensation, not an illusion. From a behavioristic viewpoint, which gives full and careful attention to the stimuli and consequences correlated with the behavior, the illusion disappears (Heyman, 2004). Another critic, from an orientation in biological psychology, accepts the concept of the illusion, which should inspire investigations of its neuronal substrates (Ito, 2004).

However it is regarded, and whatever the results of further research, espousing free will does not mean that human behavior occurs completely apart from causal factors. In the context of multiple causality, the concept of free will implies instead that the individual can operate independently of some internal and external forces.

Existentialism in Daily Life

A philosophical approach to certain dimensions of psychology, especially in Europe, existentialism commonly espouses a measure of free will. And it emphasizes the difficulties imposed on all human beings in their responsibilities for the choices they make.

A 20th-century movement encompassing several philosophical viewpoints, existentialism stresses each person's predicament as a self-determining doer, responsible for his or her own choices in life. But these choices are not readily understood; human beings do not possess substantial knowledge about themselves or their environment. Thus, they do not understand important factors in their choices. Moreover, human beings are governed by desires, fears, and other emotional states. They are not dispassionate observers of the world, but instead live in the very midst of that to which they must respond. For these reasons, existentialists study human “being” rather than human knowing. They aim to understand human existence in a world that focuses on a specific conventional, bewildering reality. On these bases, existentialism is a philosophical outlook more than it is an approach to psychology.

With no inborn knowledge to guide their choices, yet as agents responsible for themselves in their confusing environment, human beings become keenly aware of their vulnerability. For many people, the solution lies in conformity, a response strongly rejected by existentialists. It simply avoids the ultimate responsibility: making appropriate choices and acting with authority.

In the existential view, all people everywhere continuously create and re-create themselves through their choices. Each of us, as the only person who created our world, is the only one who can change it. No one else can do so for us (Yalom, 1980).

Whatever the individual's choices, numerous existentialists have pointed to anxiety as a fundamental human condition. Called angst, after the work of Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, it refers to a collection of related feelings of disease: dread, guilt, anxiety, anguish, despair, bad faith, and the like. Existential regret, for example, has been described as a profound desire to go back and make a better choice or a choice more consistent with one's beliefs and values (Lucas, 2004). In any case, angst emerges as an inevitable consequence of our uncertain universe, appearing in four basic conditions in human life.

The first condition, freedom, or the feeling of freedom, occurs with the lack of absolute structure in our lives. Even when largely restrained, most people have some alternatives. In fact, one existentialist entitled his book Escape From Freedom, emphasizing that human beings have difficulty dealing with the absence of absolute structure or restraint in their lives (May, 1994). Here the problem of choices returns to the fore. We must construct our own pathway through life. We are condemned to freedom or at least to feel free. We must deal with that burden.

The second condition, isolation, arises partly through this sense of freedom. Having our own individual

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pathways from the very beginning of life, we experience a fundamental separation from everyone else. We live in an impersonal world. As a reassurance against this feeling, we constantly seek love from one another.

And of course there is the inevitable end to all our pathways. This third condition, awareness of death and concern about what lies beyond, adds much to the angst of human life. In psychology, influential figures ranging from William James to Carl Rogers have considered the psychological implications of this awareness, noting that it can promote personal growth as well as angst (Moraglia, 2004).

Collectively, these three conditions produce a fourth concern, the central element in angst: the lack of meaning in life. With too much freedom, isolation, and the unavoidable ending, we cannot encounter any enduring meaning (Yalom, 1980). Existentialists point to our constant search for meaning among the endless decisions required in everyday life (Maddi, 2004).

Living without anyone of special significance to her, Bertha faced all these issues. Her mother's demise increased her freedom and sharply diminished the structure in her life. Bertha had already described in her journal her deeply felt sense of isolation, for which there was considerable justification. And by this time Bertha had crossed the meridian of her life. More and more she thought about that unknown day ahead when she would pass beyond all earthly understanding.

Formerly labeled “existential neurosis,” this experience of meaninglessness today might be called depression. The person lives without joy or satisfaction. But amid life's uncertainties, all of us experience doubt or despair at one point or another. Existential therapists aim to assist us in coping with this prolonged meaninglessness and accompanying angst.

One of the most prominent methods, logotherapy, is a search for meaning, regarded as a primary force in life, not a secondary consideration. The term comes from the Greek logos, denoting “meaning.” The therapist aims to make people more fully aware of this task of finding meaning and the significance of its outcome for their futures. It may emerge from a person's increased concern for personal relationships in the workplace or, for example, from her efforts to conserve natural resources. In any case, the only meaning of any importance would be the one that she assigns to her own life. The founder of logotherapy views this meaning not as invented or sought for itself but rather detected as a side effect in normal, everyday activities (Frankl, 1963).

Existential psychologists have used archival surveys to study the meaning in life. In one instance, they examined the views expressed in 283 quotations by 195 eminent people. Using content analysis, they sought a collective voice within this mass of information. But they found no one voice that spoke for all about the meaning of life, concluding, “The point of it all—if there is one—remains a mystery.” The individual struggles alone. The human mind may even be incapable of comprehending such a monumental idea (Kinnier, Kernes, Tribbensee, & van Puymbroeck, 2003).

Further analyses generated 10 themes. The two most prominent were “Life is to be enjoyed” and “We are here to love and to help others.” The least prominent themes included these views: “We must create meaning for ourselves” and “Life is absurd or a joke” (Kinnier et al., 2003).

Existentialists would concur, especially with the next-to-last of these expressions, the need to create meaning. Humanistic therapy, as emphasized later, proceeds in another direction, toward more personal growth and fulfillment. These two viewpoints share a concern for free will and the subjective side of life, but they diverge on other bases. More popular in Europe, existentialism generally confronts human limits, loneliness, and the search for meaning. Primarily an American institution, humanistic psychology addresses human development and the potential for peak experiences.

Toward a Positive Psychology

Just as existentialism stands in a long-term, somewhat distant relationship to humanistic psychology, chiefly through the questions of free will and subjective experience, positive psychology stands in a short-term, uncertain relationship, chiefly through its sudden, independent appearance in American psychology. The new millennium brought forth positive psychology in dramatic fashion, with the entire first issue of the American

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Psychologist devoted to its inauguration.

Humanistic psychologists promptly expressed satisfaction that their overall goals had received mainstream attention. In fact, positive psychology aimed to develop greater understanding of human happiness and to foster its presence, a goal certainly compatible with the humanistic traditional. As proponents of positive psychology pointed out, throughout the history of psychology studies of fear, anger, anxiety, and other negative emotional states far outnumber those on well-being. Positive psychology declared its purpose—to change this imbalance.

In its vigorous appearance, positive psychology gave relatively little attention to the history of humanistic psychology, which extends backward at least to William James, founder of American psychology (Froh, 2004). It includes five decades of research and practice in fostering human growth through humanistic psychology. It also includes a formal institution within the American Psychological Association (APA), the Division of Humanistic Psychology, and two former APA presidents, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. The co-founder of humanistic psychology, Maslow published a book 50 years ago with a chapter entitled “Toward a Positive Psychology” (Maslow, 1954). Humanistic psychologists have expressed the hope that positive psychologists might join forces with them to extend the existing research and to fulfill one enduring goal: the development of a more holistic, less medical approach to mental illness (Greening, 2001). Such an alliance would demonstrate a positive approach to humanity, as well as to other approaches in the field of psychology (Kelley, 2004).

For positive psychology, one concern lay with the humanistic approach to psychology as a scientific endeavor. Humanistic psychology began with clear empirical support from Carl Rogers' early experimental research, but gradually the scientific emphasis became submerged amid humanistic psychology's popular appeal, spawning much “pop psychology.” Aiming to bring renewed interest to the empirical study of optimism and successful self-direction, positive psychology unfurled its banner.

This research focuses on subjective well-being, which in popular conversation means happiness or “living the good life,” typically measured on a 10-point scale ranging from extremely unhappy to completely satisfied with life. Data from random samples of many thousands of people responding to the scale present a more favorable outlook on life than philosophers and poets generally depict (Myers & Diener, 1996).

Research in different regions around the world has indicated that happiness is closely associated with at least three basic conditions in life: friends, faith, and funds. The importance of friends, including family, seems obvious. We are social creatures; we seek social support. Faith offers not only meaning and goals in life but social support as well, for most faiths are institutionally based. Finally, the importance of funds also appears obvious, but an exception occurs. Funds appear as a central factor in low-income environments, where basic human needs are threatened. In these poor regions, funds and happiness are clearly related. In affluent circumstances, with life's necessities regularly met, wealth shows a lower correlation with subjective well- being. Extremely wealthy people in the United States are only somewhat happier than people with average incomes. A major reason, of course, is that people adapt to their comfortable circumstances. Today's luxuries are tomorrow's necessities and the next day's rubbish (Myers, 2000).

These studies point to positive psychology's broad interest in subjective experience—how optimism affects health, how talent comes to fruition, what constitutes happiness and life satisfaction. The aim is not only to increase a sense of well-being but thereby to prevent the pathological outcomes that emerge from a destitute or meaningless existence. Fostering tolerance, altruism, and other evidence of good citizenship, the overall goal is to enable people and their societies to flourish (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

One means of helping people to increase their level of happiness has been adapted from cognitive therapy (Ellis, 1991). The basic idea is to help people recognize and then challenge their own pessimistic thoughts. They do so in positive psychology by taking the role of some supportive person in their life, someone likely to note and resist a negative self-statement: “I'm too slow to become a keyboard operator.” The person expressing this thought is charged with refuting it in the imagined manner of a critical but helpful colleague: presenting contrary factual evidence, looking for alternative viewpoints, assessing carefully all implications, and so forth (Seligman, 1991). This approach is an extension of cognitive therapy, considered in detail in the

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next chapter.

Another practical application appears in the form of popular books. One recent effort has produced a Happiness Model, offering advice on long-term goals. It encourages followers to regard long-term goals as means, not ends (Ben-Shahar, 2002). They become important not so much through attaining them but in having them.

This model depicts four archetypes or templates for conducting one's life: the rat race, hedonism, resignation, and happiness. Consider a man aiming to include physical exercise as a regular part of his life. Whether or not he recognizes it, his approach to both the present and future becomes a fundamental factor in his overall happiness.

The first pattern, the rat race, promises future happiness at the price of current pain. The man maintains a rigid workout schedule, seeking the most extensive aerobic and strengthening exercises in the least amount of time. He is not happy with this constant demand on his time and energy, but there should be a payoff in his later years. The second pattern, hedonism, favors the opposite pathway—immediate pleasure over future health and happiness. He exercises, but only on an irregular basis, whenever it is convenient and the urge strikes him. In resignation, the third pattern, he ignores beneficial exercise completely, foregoing a source of present and future happiness. And in the final pattern, the happiness archetype, he pursues a reasonable exercise program in a steady fashion, experiencing present enjoyment and the expectation of fulfillment in the future (Ben-Shahar, 2002).

From this standpoint, happiness is not standing on the peak of the mountain, where the wind blows hardest, and it is not wildly scrambling up the incline. Happiness lies in the experience of moving reasonably well toward a long-term goal. That distant goal fosters present happiness.

Throughout all such efforts, scientists and practitioners in psychology acknowledge the difficulties in defining happiness, well-being, self-esteem, and the good life. One widely cited definition of self-esteem, for example, depicts two dimensions: confidence in one's capacity to cope with life's basic challenges and the confidence in one's right to happiness (Branden, 1994).

These criteria appear reasonably valid, but they are not sufficiently operationalized for scientific research. And operationalizing them raises another very difficult issue, the question of values.

A half-century ago, a psychologist concluded that a value-free definition appears impossible (Smith, 1959). Emotional responses are biologically driven, but the meaning of those responses can be markedly influenced by the individual's psychological makeup. These psychological reactions, in turn, are socially derived, influenced by one's sense of self and reality, and vary across cultures. In other words, individual personal values become a significant concern in the search for universal and historical principles of well-being. Then, too, subjective well-being presumably emerges differently in different cultures, such as those in a survival mode versus those in affluent circumstances. On these bases, research on happiness and well-being must be diverse and apparently phenomenological, as well as empirical (Compton, 2001).

When their interests in human subjectivity are compared, humanistic psychology is more rational and idiographic than positive psychology—it is more concerned with the individual. It attends to case studies and the whole person, including broad concepts about the self, making data analyses interpretive and sometimes closer to philosophy than to science. Compelling evidence of reliability and verification may remain elusive. In contrast, positive psychology is more empirical and nomothetic, focused on understanding people in general. It generates large-scale surveys of specific features of groups of people, obtaining estimates of reliability through extensive statistical analyses.

An alliance between these two psychologies would prevent further fragmentation in the field and would underscore the need for further studies of human happiness. As a founder of humanistic psychology, Maslow stated decades ago that “positive psychology,” or “orthopsychology,” in the future would focus on healthy, fully functioning individuals, not exclusively on ill people. But this mutual interest on the part of humanistic and positive psychology occurs amid their somewhat different goals and methods, resulting in different research

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programs (Aanstoos, 2003). At present, positive psychology stands as a broad follow-up initiative, its capacity to bring subjective well-being into mainstream psychology yet to be determined.

Person-Centered Therapy

Despite construction of The Home, Bertha did not show the signs of happiness that might have been expected. As founder, director, and coordinator of all its activities, she often seemed too demanding, too self-centered, and too critical; perhaps she was still struggling against the excessive control exerted by her parents and society in her Vienna years.

In those troubled times, Bertha's mother had called on a general practitioner to assist her daughter, and he blindly let Bertha lead. If Bertha's mother had contacted instead a modern humanistic psychologist, that therapist would have accepted much of Breuer's makeshift pathway—but with greater understanding of the professional and ethical practices it requires. The chief humanistic therapy today reflects what the diligent, confused Breuer apparently attempted years earlier. But self-theory and modern research have brought it beyond his early efforts.

In permitting Bertha to direct her own therapy, Breuer adopted a completely unconventional approach at that time. Patients in that era were not allowed to discuss much of anything and certainly not irrational, irrelevant ideas. That wasted time. Instead, they followed the usual clinical practice; they listened to the doctor's advice. A permissive but active listener, Breuer opened the floodgates for Bertha's thoughts and feelings (Karpe, 1961).

A Growth-Inducing Environment

This capacity for facilitating open expression in a troubled person should not be regarded lightly. Only very rarely does a therapeutic release of tension appear in daily conversation. Many topics are not appropriate for such open, nonjudgmental discussion. The listeners are too concerned with their own lives and schedules to devote themselves consistently and fully to comprehending the issues of others. The conversations become too emotionally laden for the comfort of the participants. And unless a special appointment has been made for this purpose, it is never quite the right time or place for such a dialogue. For men, moreover, self-disclosure is not an easy matter (Banaji & Prentice, 1994). Women in daily conversation communicate to friends far more about their intimate thoughts and feelings than men do (Dindia & Allen, 1992). Men are less inclined to enter psychotherapy. And no psychotherapy is likely to succeed without self-disclosure and emotional responsiveness on the part of the person seeking assistance (Betz & Fitzgerald, 1993).

Thus Bertha's therapy established a new pattern in that era, the modern “talking cure.” It stimulated Freud's thinking about memories and psychoanalytic therapy, and it foreshadowed person-centered therapy, the most common approach in humanistic psychology. Like today's person-centered therapist, Breuer made few if any interpretations. He did not act like a substitute parent, sympathetic friend, or even a traditional therapist. Instead he mostly listened, without interrupting (Strachey, 1955). This implicit support has become a fundamental feature in many psychotherapies today.

Including a premise of free will, person-centered therapy assumes that all human beings have the capacity to determine successfully their own destiny, choosing means and goals that lead to personal fulfillment. All of us, according to this viewpoint, are at the center of our own existence and therefore capable of directing our own lives, including the proper course of therapy. In fact, the person experiencing stress must guide the therapy; otherwise the treatment will be unsuccessful.

This capacity to guide one's own therapy arises through the actualizing tendency. In a troubled individual, it has been blocked by external or internalized barriers, and the therapist tries to release it. Hence, the three-phase premise for person-centered therapy is as follows: If the therapist can create an appropriate interpersonal environment, the capacity for growth will be released, and personal development will occur.

In Rogers' metaphor, the potatoes in that deep, dark cellar needed a growth-inducing environment. They

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needed rich soil and sunlight.

With all human beings, an appropriate interpersonal environment is the crucial factor, and here three characteristics of the therapist's response play an essential role: empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard. Collectively, they communicate a warm, nonjudgmental atmosphere in which the therapist thinks with, rather than about, the person. Then the person seeking help begins to adopt a more positive view of herself, caring for herself as a person. Her potential becomes released, and she begins to respond in ways appropriate to herself (Rogers, 1971).

Someone with empathy understands the state of mind of someone else. The empathetic person knows how another person feels—but does not feel that way too or to the same extent. Breuer seemed to have empathy for Bertha; he understood and accepted her turmoil without feeling upset himself. Sympathy is a state of experiencing someone else's feeling, usually an unpleasant feeling. Sympathy may disrupt efforts at understanding, particularly when the feelings are strong.

The reports Breuer published and sent to the hospital provide little direct information about genuineness, which means acting in an open, honest fashion, without pomp or pretense. Sometimes called authenticity, genuineness is based on honesty and sincerity, which Breuer demonstrated in those early sessions, openly acknowledging the death of Bertha's father, revealing his intention to use force in her hospitalization, and explaining the purposes and procedures of his therapeutic efforts. In any ethical treatment, it is assumed that a therapist's integrity and authenticity enhance open expression by the person seeking help, promoting change and constructive growth (Rogers, 1980).

The third characteristic is an attitude toward people. In this growth-inducing environment, there can be no conditions of worth, no reservations on the part of the therapist. Even in Bertha's most trying times, Breuer never dismissed her or any of her symptoms as unworthy of his attention. Instead, he showed a no-strings- attached regard for her as an individual, regardless of her behavior. When a therapist, caretaker, or any other person communicates love and acceptance without reservation, this attitude is known as unconditional positive regard. It is a fundamental belief in the dignity of any person, troubled or otherwise. When a therapist demonstrates this warmth and caring, people know they are accepted regardless of their thoughts and feelings. The acceptance is obvious and constant (Zimring, 1990).

In describing the therapeutic environment in these ways, Carl Rogers opposed earlier approaches to psychotherapy, which were modeled more on theoretical conceptions and specific techniques, less on the person-therapist relationship. In traditional psychoanalysis, for example, the analyst seeks a degree of neutrality, maintaining a separation from the person. In the person-centered approach, the therapist aims instead for greater warmth in the relationship. Rogers' focus on empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard played a major role in developing a concern for the therapeutic alliance. But favorable outcomes are most promising only when the therapist shows a natural inclination toward these characteristics, together with extensive practice and self-monitoring during therapy.

In person-centered therapy, an individual can use this acceptance to examine her own experiencing. Under no pressure from others, she guides the course of therapy according to her needs and discoveries about herself. As she becomes aware of her own experiencing, she becomes responsive again to directional trends in the organismic valuing process. In this way, she fosters the basic force in her life, the actualizing tendency.

From the person-centered viewpoint, Bertha's condition improved during her therapy with Breuer because she found herself in an open, growth-inducing environment. Breuer approached her not in a paternalistic or protective way, but apparently with empathy, maybe genuineness, and initially an effort at unconditional positive regard. Each session offered Bertha a catharsis, a release of emotional tension.

In modern person-centered therapy, Bertha would begin by discussing with her therapist all sorts of “safe” topics—making laces, doing housework, and horseback riding—with no mention of gender roles or sexuality. Her anger over the favoritism shown to Wilhelm was not understood as a cultural issue, and she did not perceive it that way at the time. Her complete absence of sexual responsiveness was not even regarded as a problem, or it was viewed as a topic to be avoided.

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Gradually, in this special interpersonal environment, the actualizing tendency—the capacity for more complete development—would be released. Bertha then would begin to address some of her frustrations, beginning with those close to her awareness, such as parental overprotection and religious restrictions. Later she would consider less accessible, more difficult issues, such as the imbalance in gender roles. Eventually, she would examine psychological obstacles still further from normal consciousness, the personal and social conditions that prevented her from achieving a normal sexual adjustment (Noshpitz, 1984).

In her sessions with Breuer, over many months, she spoke at length about her father, idealizing him in displays of affection and compassion. She mentioned her brother only in one or two incidents. And she spoke of her mother not at all. These disparities and omissions in Bertha's discourse suggest that she was unable to engage in self-discovery in Breuer's therapeutic environment (Figure 6.3)

Figure 6.3 Person-Centered Therapy. The therapist aims for three characteristics that cannot become effective when assumed naively or superficially. Empathy, depicted by the dashed arrow, involves “walking” in the other person's footsteps, understanding that person from her viewpoint. In the counseling relationship, genuineness, represented by the straight, solid, downward arrow, means that the therapist is authentic and trustworthy, not a phony or defended person. In unconditional positive regard, the therapist shows unwavering, nonjudgmental loyalty, warmth, and acceptance, symbolized by the lighted torch

Facilitating Self-Exploration

In modern person-centered therapy, Bertha would more readily confront the sources of incongruence in her life. Her experience with menstrual periods and other evidence of physical development regularly informed her that she was a sexually mature woman. Yet her sexual interests and expression remained at a preadolescent stage. Similarly, her daily experience informed her that she was an intelligent, capable woman.

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Yet her parents restricted her to dull, trivial work, especially in comparison with Wilhelm. Incongruence in both spheres, sexual and intellectual, lowered her self-esteem and stunted her personal development.

To encourage self-exploration, the person-centered therapist responds in ways that reflect acceptance of the person seeking assistance. Holding up a metaphorical mirror, the therapist enables people in therapy to see themselves more accurately. Some of these ways of responding include active listening, restatement, clarification, and silence.

These ways have been successfully used by person-centered therapists around the world (Motschnig & Nykl, 2003). But they cannot become effective when applied in a mechanical or rote fashion. They cannot serve as how-to techniques. They are attitudes and feelings as well, requiring extensive experience and a clear commitment by the therapist, who must have a deep belief in the person seeking therapy and in the helping relationship as often more important than medication (Fisher, 2003).

In active listening, the therapist shows attention by emitting almost inaudible vocalizations at just the right moments. These sounds are not words with semantic meaning; they are nonintrusive signs of thoughtful interest, such as “mmmhm” and “ummmhmmm.” Through their timing and consistency, together with eye contact and facial expression, they would convey to Bertha, “I am with you.”

In restatement of content, the therapist goes one step further, rephrasing the person's thoughts in similar words. This response shows active listening and understanding. The content of the remark is reflected, not just attentiveness.

Still another response goes beyond restatement. In the clarification of feelings, the therapist tries to assist the person in sorting out her thoughts and feelings, which are commonly scrambled, mixed with one another. Here the therapist repeats the person's verbal expressions but uses different words, aiming to discover whether he and the person in therapy have correctly identified her various feelings. If so, they have opened a pathway for dealing with them. Here, still holding up a mirror, the therapist may gently remark on the patient's tone of voice, gestures, or posture, or the therapist may demonstrate these reactions, simply showing the patient how she is behaving. The therapist makes no interpretation.

The response of silence makes a strong, unambiguous statement. It shows full acceptance of the person and the therapeutic process. There is no need to fill silences; they are not awkward; they are time for reflection. The person is left with her own thoughts, free to express them whenever and however she wishes.

Within these ways of responding and a growth-inducing interpersonal relationship, the actualizing tendency is released and control “goes inside”—the person takes charge of her own life. She identifies areas of incongruence, explores them, and achieves some resolution (Rogers, 1951, 1961).

In this setting, Bertha eventually would reconsider the loss of her father, injustices by her mother, and comparisons with Wilhelm. In time, evidence of interest in peers would emerge, including thoughts of sexuality. These outcomes would confirm a feeling of progress, leading to further understanding, further relief, and perhaps even increased accord with her mother and the often tyrannical Wilhelm. But Breuer lacked this background and understanding of person-centered therapy. He listened attentively and held up the metaphorical mirror for a while, helping Bertha to look at herself (Tolpin, 2000). With his abrupt departure, she never finished her task.

But Breuer deserves special credit for his tolerance. He did not muddy the waters, intruding into Bertha's self-exploration. The merits of his achievement, he wrote, lay in his recognition of the scientifically important case that chance had left to him and in his unwillingness to disrupt the facts and progress of that case with preconceived opinions (Hirschmüller, 1989).

In this dedication, Breuer vaguely sensed the importance of the patient-therapist relationship, regarded today as a critical element in any form of therapy. For a positive outcome, especially in humanistic therapy, the patient must believe that the therapist truly understands her and cares about her welfare, and the therapist must merit these attributions, a condition called the therapeutic alliance. For many practitioners, this alliance

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may be more important than the method of treatment.

Today the significance of a successful therapeutic alliance is better understood, and Breuer brought it to scientific attention. In fact, he suggested that this early evidence for the interpersonal nature of the therapeutic process, brought forth in Anna O.'s surprising transference reaction to him, stood as his most important contribution to the world (Freud, 1925a).

Bertha formed such an alliance, which made Breuer's sudden departure all the more disruptive. Had she continued with this therapy, and had Breuer been more knowledgeable about it, eventually she might have seen herself differently—as a young woman rightfully resisting any role that depicted her as an extension of her mother, substitute for her sisters, foil for her brother, or submissive spouse to someone with perhaps less intelligence. She might have accepted herself as a person seeking self-expression, dealing with unrecognized sexuality, and desiring her own way of life.

Apparently Breuer created a promising interpersonal environment for this therapy, which did not reach a long- term conclusion. When his affection for his patient became incompatible with his standards of professional behavior, he ceased treatment. He did not allow Bertha any opportunity to object, to continue for a while, or even to plan for its termination. For this sudden cessation of therapy, Breuer would find himself today liable in another malpractice suit.

But his society did not recognize this ethical issue. So Josef Breuer should be remembered instead for his sustained effort at enhancing health and effectiveness in human beings, even those seemingly without significant adjustment problems. This goal underscores the optimistic outlook in humanistic psychology. Human beings can control their own lives. They are determining, as well as determined. Every human being has the potential to achieve fulfillment.

Commentary and Critique

One broad limitation in all psychological inquiry occurs with the dilemma considered earlier: investigating the parts or the whole, seeking precision or fullness. Study of the parts, known as reductionism, appeared earlier in the discussion of biological psychology. Here in humanistic psychology we turn to the study of the whole. Any commentary on psychological perspectives must consider the ways in which they respond to this issue.

Reductionism, the common, highly productive pathway in modern science, is not universal in psychology. Many investigators believe that complex phenomena can never be adequately explained in terms of their basic elements. Reductionism sets narrow boundaries, limiting the concern with multiple factors. The premise in holism is that an organic entity, especially a human being, is different from the sum of its parts; it can be understood only as a totality. The parts interact; they gain something from their interdependence—or they lose something. The concern lies with their relationships. Hence, they must be studied together, as a unified whole, which is a special concern in humanistic inquiry.

The narrative of Bertha illustrates this concern. It presents her life in the context of culture, a vital consideration because personality never develops free from culture. Told partly by Bertha and partly by her biographers, this narrative expresses her experiences in upper-class Vienna and working-class Frankfurt, providing a broad, holistic view not so readily possible outside a storytelling mode (McAdams & Pals, 2006).

The term holism, incidentally, sometimes appears with another first letter, as wholism. The latter spelling more readily communicates the idea of a whole or complete entity, as opposed to a hole, but it is less commonly used.

One hears the term most often these days in the context of holistic health, meaning that the body, the mind, and their parts function as inseparable units, each influencing the well-being of one another. Thus, treatment for some disorders must focus on their integration within the whole person.

Consider a simpler example. In a large pile of bricks, the relationships are random. One brick can be broken, displaced, or even removed without altering the whole pile in any significant way. A soap bubble is a different

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matter. The “parts” are integrated. A pinprick in one area produces a drastic change in the whole bubble (Wertheimer, 1972). In a metaphorical sense, every investigator must decide whether to approach a certain phenomenon as a pile of bricks or more like a bubble. Reductionistic and holistic goals can seldom be pursued simultaneously.

Reductionism places the highest priority on precision and control, which are matters of degree. Holism suggests an absolute condition—that all possible elements can be included, which simply does not occur in psychological research. An investigation of depression might aim to include afflicted persons, their families, home life, sleep habits, nutrition, exercise, friendships, childhood experiences, and work settings. But examining all these and other elements in detail, all seemingly relevant to depression, becomes prohibitive, even in a single case study. For this reason, psychologists sometimes refer to a single investigation of comparatively large units of behavior as nonreductionism.

In this context, two types of wholes should be acknowledged. An aggregate or additive whole is simply the sum of its parts, as in a random pile of bricks or bisected rectangle. In a functional or organic whole, involving special relationships among its parts, their sum may not be equal to the whole. An individual's personality is not simply the sum of certain traits. The traits combine in various ways. Individuals with similar traits can be different indeed, depending on how their traits interact.

Characteristics of a functional or organic whole not evident in its elementary properties are called emergent properties. They appear only in the union of the parts, and they are not necessarily predictable from a knowledge of them.

As a functional whole, a Dickens novel employs words available to any speaker of English, but the relationships among them produce emergent properties—the power of his prose. A successful painting gains something special from the combination of colors, shapes, sizes, and so forth. One sometimes hears this expression: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But that outcome may fail to appear; the functional whole also may be less than the sum of its parts. A team of highly promising individuals may perform below its expected level because of disruptive relationships among its members. The family, society's basic social unit, fosters favorable psychological development depending on the relationships among parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and other people in that unit. More accurately, an organic whole may be different from the sum of its parts, whether that whole is a brain, a person, or a culture. Humanistic psychology takes a marked interest in expressions of holism.

Most organic entities are regarded today as interactive systems, and one major research aim is to gain further understanding of them as systems—their parts in relation to one another. Without this concern in psychology, many investigations of mental life, behavior, and their disorders would fall to biology, chemistry, physics, and other basic sciences. Emergent properties would be ignored; the concept of mind as mind would disappear from science (Wertheimer, 1972). And the concept of self as self would disappear from psychology, or it would be described in terms of submicroscopic particles of energy and matter. The fundamental challenge therefore lies in integrating a hierarchy of findings from different levels of inquiry (Pinker, 2002).

In the study of people, psychology inevitably becomes concerned with organic wholes. And more than the other perspectives, humanistic psychology reflects holistic aims, involving the most inaccessible realms of human experience. Currently, these free-ranging explorations become possible only at the cost of precision in measurement.

Diminished precision leads to a potential problem of reliability, meaning a concern with the accuracy and consistency of measurement. Would a different investigator obtain different scores? Would the same investigator obtain the same scores on a different occasion? Compared with the instruments and techniques employed in experimental and survey research, those used in case studies and observational methods are comparatively unstructured, making the collection and analysis of data less statistical, more thematic, thereby increasing the chances for investigator bias. Especially in a single case study, the numerical data do not permit use of advanced statistical methods for assessing reliability.

Among the perspectives, psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology also have been most susceptible

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to the falsification problem, partly because of their reliance on the traditional case study. In an applied setting, the case study can offer useful solutions to everyday problems. In a research setting, it can incorporate extensive psychological knowledge and respect for the rules of science, producing helpful data and suggesting productive hypotheses. But it remains an interpretive statement. Without substantial controls, it cannot be shown to be false.

Humanistic psychology often accepts such tradeoffs, emphasizing that the field is a human science, requiring research methods different from those of the natural sciences. Psychology, in this view, should not be limited to objective observations in highly controlled settings. This stance elicits obvious resistance from mainstream psychology. So the nonreductionism in humanistic and psychoanalytic psychology pushes these perspectives to the edge of modern science. Some would say they lie beyond its borders.

The problem of precision appears in still another context, recognized earlier. The foundations of humanistic psychology include several non-operationalized concepts, offering little or no consensus on how they can or should be measured. These entities include the actualizing tendency, conditions of worth, organismic valuing process, incongruence, and the self, among others. According to critics, they are too vague to be measured and tested adequately.

The organismic valuing process, for example, plays a vital role in the self-concept. But it remains difficult to assess. It seems virtually impossible to know when a person, especially a preverbal child, is choosing activities that enhance one's self. Conditions of worth suffer the same problem. They remain unclear because the organismic valuing process cannot be clearly conceived. Useful in theory, such concepts need to be readily measurable in research.

Nevertheless, early in the emergence of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers and his colleagues conducted the first experimental, nonreductionistic studies of personal growth gained through psychotherapy. Using several inventories and rating scales, they studied intensively 52 people ranging in age from the twenties to forties, whom they divided into an experimental or therapy group and a control or waiting group. The motivation to enter therapy can be influential in therapy outcomes; therefore, they assigned to the control group only people who had requested therapy but agreed to remain on a “wait list.” Moreover, half the people in therapy served as their own control group, waiting a certain interval before entering therapy, thereby providing a comparison in their mental health for two periods, before and after therapy. Rogers thereby implemented several procedures for control in an era when even competent practitioners considered therapy too intuitive and intangible to be studied by objectively controlled methods. In fact, many therapists strongly opposed any attempt to assess the outcomes of psychotherapy (Gordon, Grummon, Rogers, & Seeman, 1954).

Electronic recording instruments had just become available, and Rogers used them extensively, obtaining permission to tape each session anonymously and thereby collecting the first large set of data on therapeutic dialogues. These tapes enabled the psychologists to evaluate their therapeutic procedures, to present evidence of the growth process, and thereby to provide support for the person-centered approach to therapy (Rogers & Dymond, 1954).

Expanding this work to include group therapy, Rogers and his colleagues focused on the ways members gave, received, and exchanged emotional support with one another, as well as the ways they redefined themselves after the group meetings. These findings raised awareness about subjective experience, as well as the growth process. Gradually, the person-centered approach became prominent in therapy facilities around the country—business, schools, hospitals, the military, and elsewhere. The humanistic perspective thereby made its mark in psychology—through psychotherapy, rather than extensive basic research.

Summary

Rise of Humanistic Psychology

Promoted by Carl Rogers, humanistic psychology achieved a prominent position, partly through its optimistic outlook. Compared to other psychological perspectives, it places less emphasis on science and more on

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human subjectivity, individuality, and the capacity for growth. For Rogers, potatoes in a cold, dark cellar became a metaphor for humanistic psychology. Their response in this adverse environment demonstrated an inherent tendency toward growth, called the actualizing tendency.

Key Terms: humanistic psychology, actualizing tendency, phenomenology

Three Human Characteristics

The starting point for humanistic psychology is human subjectivity—the private experience of the individual, not the objective world as defined by popular consensus. Human individuality, the second dimension of human uniqueness, appears in many forms, including our capacity for self-awareness, which results in the self-concept, ideal self, self-esteem, and other views of oneself. Humanistic psychology's optimism occurs largely through its emphasis on a third human characteristic—the actualizing tendency, an inborn impetus in any living organism toward the fullest possible development.

Key Terms: subjectivity, individuality, self theory, self, self-concept, ideal self, self-esteem, Maslow's motivational hierarchy, self-actualization

Influence of Early Experience

A temporary state, congruence occurs when an individual's views of the self and personal experience are compatible with one another. Incongruence reflects a poor self-concept. It also reflects a poor match between the self-concept and personal experience or between the self-concept and the ideal self. The roots of incongruence are laid early in life, whenever conditions of worth stifle the organismic valuing process, disrupting the child's contact with her most basic feelings about herself.

Key Terms: organismic valuing process, conditions of worth, congruence, incongruence, fully functioning person

Philosophical and Practical Issues

In psychology the humanistic view of free will assumes that human beings have the capacity to make choices appropriate to their own lives, thereby achieving personal growth. Existentialism also makes the assumption of self-determination but with greater attention to the problems of freedom, isolation, death, and finding meaning in life. Positive psychology emphasizes the study of subjective well-being; its emergence raises a practical issue about its relationship to humanistic psychology and cognitive therapy.

Key Terms: free will, determinism, existentialism, logotherapy, positive psychology, subjective well-being

Person-Centered Therapy

Person-centered therapy relies on the capacity of the individual to solve her own problems. With empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard, the therapist creates a nonthreatening environment that releases this capacity, allowing the individual to explore her own thoughts and feelings in whatever ways seem appropriate. The therapist supports these explorations through active listening, restatement of content, clarification of feelings, and silence, figuratively holding up a mirror for the person to view herself.

Key Terms: person-centered therapy, empathy, genuineness, unconditional positive regard, therapeutic alliance

Commentary and Critique

More than the other perspectives, humanistic psychology tends toward holism, aimed at awareness, personal growth, fulfillment, and other broad dimensions of human life. This goal has the potential for examining emergent properties, but measurements thereby become less precise, producing uncertain reliability. Several important but nonoperationalized concepts also raise the issue of precision in research.

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Key Terms: holism, emergent properties, problem of reliability, nonoperationalized concepts

Critical Thinking

Consider Carl Rogers' conditions of worth, B. F. Skinner's reinforcement history, and Sigmund Freud's early experience. Describe how these concepts are similar. Then indicate some differences, according to the perspectives in which they appear. Modify Maslow's motivational hierarchy to include a concern for social issues. Be specific. Indicate where and how you would include another stage or modification of a pre-existing stage. An adolescent experiences a school phobia. Explain a fundamental way in which a humanistic psychologist and behaviorist would view the problem differently. Do more than describe each treatment; focus also on the origins of the problem.

• psychology • positive psychology • persons • free will • self-concept • happiness • parenting • parents • existentialism • self-esteem

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n6

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https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n6

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Psychology: Six Perspectives

Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic Psychology
Rise of Humanistic Psychology
Rogers and Growth Potential
Protest of the Third Force
Three Human Characteristics
Subjectivity: The Basic Reality
Individuality and Self Theory
Figure 6.1 Multiple Selves and Personal Identity. A college student wrote separately to his mother, girlfriend, and coach about a dispute with a teammate, presenting himself somewhat differently in each instance. According to self theory, the “real” student is a composite of these different selves. The double-headed arrows suggest that all people construct their identities partly through multiple selves
The Capacity for Growth
Influence of Early Experience
Conditions of Worth
Congruence and Incongruence
Figure 6.2 Incongruence and Congruence. A student becomes tense when thinking about himself taking a math test. The circles at the left, with little overlap, illustrate the incongruence between his self-concept and that experience. After special instruction, psychotherapy, or some other growth process, congruence increases, illustrated in the largely overlapping circles at the right. His sense of self and experience in a math test are more compatible
Philosophical and Practical Issues
The Question of Free Will
Existentialism in Daily Life
Toward a Positive Psychology
Person-Centered Therapy
A Growth-Inducing Environment
Figure 6.3 Person-Centered Therapy. The therapist aims for three characteristics that cannot become effective when assumed naively or superficially. Empathy, depicted by the dashed arrow, involves “walking” in the other person's footsteps, understanding that person from her viewpoint. In the counseling relationship, genuineness, represented by the straight, solid, downward arrow, means that the therapist is authentic and trustworthy, not a phony or defended person. In unconditional positive regard, the therapist shows unwavering, nonjudgmental loyalty, warmth, and acceptance, symbolized by the lighted torch
Facilitating Self-Exploration
Commentary and Critique
Summary
Critical Thinking