Huminstic Approach

When reviewing the material it becomes apparent that there is more than enough information to fully express the views and goals of the humanistic approach. The challenge, however is describing the material in a manner that flows smoothly from one aspect to the next as well as staying within and along a train of thought that will provoke students’ interest and participation in the discussion. To start I would first run through some of the general concepts, get some feed back to make sure everyone understood the concepts such as phenomenology, and existentialism before going into individual theories and specific beliefs of the more influential humanistic psychologists, and lastly showing how these theories can be applied to their lives and experiences. By asking questions that place every individual into the discussion and get them to ask these types of questions of themselves as well as inspiring them to actively pursue the answers.

The main focus of humanistic psychology is that your conscious experience of the world, or your phenomenology, is more important than the real world itself (psychologically speaking). This means that the only place and time in which you exist at all is in your consciousness, here and now. The past, future, people, places you know and see are no more than ideas or perceptions of your mind. What I’m getting at is that there maybe a broader reality that exists but only the part of it that you perceive or conjure up will ever matter to you. Your own experience of the world if often referred to as your construal. The man who opened the first psychology laboratory around 1879 in Leipzig, Germany, Wilhelm Wundt was solely looking to study the human experience of objects and events, for example how water “feels” wet. Thus training in introspection or the observing of one’s own mental process was held in high regards by Wundt, but eventually psychology deemed this particular discipline somewhat obsolete asking how anything could ever come to benefit from the studies and so it moved in other directions with concrete results as it progressed. Not abandoned by all, many contributions to psychology in general have come from great humanists like Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers whom are two of the great minds of the field which I will dwell into shortly.

Existentialism was a philosophical movement started in Europe during the mid-1800s. Stemming from the thought that rationality had gone too far in its attempts to account for everything, particularly that science, technology, and rational philosophy had lost touch with human experience. The purpose of the existential philosophy was to regain contact with the sensation or experience of being alive and aware. According to one existential philosopher, Ludwig Binswanger, that if you look into your own mind you will find that the conscious experience of being alive has three components. The first is biological or Umwelt, which consists of the sensations of pleasure, pain, heat, cold, sensations of your eyes, ears, nose, skin, and tongue as well. The second is social or Mitwlet, which consists of what you think and feel as a social being who relates to other people, i.e. the experience to love, fear, or admiring of someone. Third is inner psychological experience or Eigenwelt, which consists of how you feel and think when you try to understand yourself, your mind, and your existence. All of these aspects can be influenced by another theory known as your thrown-ness, or where, when and under what circumstances you were born into. A person’s experience is quite different if they were born onto a slave plantation or the royal family of England. There are many different and vast amounts of things that can influence a person’s experiences and thus their lives so what do we do, why would we try to follow the existentialists’ view and approaches, what is the end goal? To achieve authentic existence is to come to terms with your existence in the world, being honest, insightful and morally correct. The facts that you are mortal, your life is short, and you are the master of your own destiny within these limits is important because authentic existence will not save you from loneliness and unhappiness. Life has no meaning beyond what you give it, which means that any apparent meaning life might have is an illusion.

So now what, if life is apparently meaningless what motivates people to get up in the morning and go on with life, or even better yet what makes people like Michael Jordan go out and be the best human to ever play basketball? A couple of the greatest psychologists of there time changed the whole out look from this bleak perspective to one of a more positive nature. Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow both theorized that people have one basic tendency and striving to actualize, maintain, and enhance oneself. Making the goal of life to satisfy this need. The difference between