Rationale for client work and reference theory

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Humanistic Theory

Humanistic learning theory as explained by Lipscomb, & Ishmael (2009 p. 174) emphasizes feeling, experience, self-awareness, personal growth, and individual / psychic optimization. Learning, from this perspective, is positioned as both social process and psychological/intellectual endeavor. Humanism aspires to place lecturers alongside students in mutually constituted, cooperative enquiry, variously described, this form of 'peer learning community 'situates the lecturer as an authority rather than in authority. It is a form of education that, by traditional or historical standards, places novel demands upon students who are now expected to act intentionally in pursuit of learning and understanding. Humanist principles require students to join with lecturers in this endeavor, and they are implicitly expected to develop and share values concerning the importance of scholarship.

Humanistic and experiential psychotherapies coalesced around the humanistic movement that emerged in the United States and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. A number of psychologists, including Maslow, Rogers, Moustakas, and May, dis-satis-ed with the dominant paradigm, began to analyze the values, assumptions, and methods of psychological practices and thought. These writers were at odds with the nomothetic and reductionistic stance of the natural sciences being applied to the study of human experience. They called for a more human science that would incorporate naturalistic methods and description. There was also a growing concern that psychology was focusing on behavior and the observable dimensions of human experience as opposed to the inner, subjective processes that humanistic psychologists saw as core to human functioning. The theories of psychotherapy that coalesced around this movement include client-centered, experiential, existential, and gestalt. These psychotherapies are based on shared values and principles that differentiate them from other major approaches, including psychodynamic, cognitive -- behavioral, and family systems (Watson, Goldman & Greenberg, 2011 p. 141).

(Farber, 2010 p.28 ) The humanistic and existential psychotherapy approaches share a focus on helping clients make the most of their psychological potentialities, though the two approaches differ somewhat in how they conceptualize this focus. Humanistic psychotherapy tends to emphasize the creation of psychotherapeutic conditions for cultivating an innate actualizing tendency that is posited to propel psychological growth. Existential psychotherapy posits that psychological vitality and fullness in living spring from one's willingness both to take responsibility for one's freedom to choose and to accept that one's potentiality is bounded by one's physical, social, and psychological contexts, as well as specific existential givens with which one must reconcile oneself.