Compare And Contrast The Strengths Of The Humanist Approach
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The humanistic approach was created in America during the 1950s, and was pioneered by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. The approach emphasises that humans are naturally good and that we must grow in order to reach our full potentials as healthy, happy people.
Other approaches have been fairly deterministic as they believe that behaviour is partially governed by forces that are out of our control, and even the cognitive approach, that says that we can choose our own thoughts, believes that this choice is still limited to our cognitive capabilities. The humanist approach is more deterministic, as it claims that humans have free will that we can use to control our development. Humanist psychologists reject any models that explain behaviour on a general basis, as they believe that psychology should be subjective. This is called the person-centered approach.
The past approaches had been too reductionist by trying to compartmentalise behaviour too much, but the humanist approach believes that behaviour and experience are intrinsically linked, and is holistic in that it says that subjective experience can only be understood by considering the whole person. This suggests that the humanist approach may have more validity than past approaches.
Humanists believe we…show more content… If there is an incongruence between these two states it is impossible to grow. Rogers developed the client-centered therapy to reduce this incongruence. He said that any feelings of negative emotions as an adult are a result of receiving conditions of worth set by the parent as a child, such as the parent will only offer them praise if they get an A in maths. This will only lead to the person not being able to fully self-actualise when they are older, so Rogers saw it as his duty to offer the unconditional positive regard to his clients that never received