Humanistic Psychology

Assignment 1: Ever since I began my doctoral program I have grown a lot as a person. There have been many instances that have taught me about myself and what I would like to achieve in life. However, there was one experience in particular that truly helped me understand my path in life and what that will lead to as a doctoral learner. My identity as a doctoral learner was experienced by observing people and how they lived their lives, specifically from a woman named Jill.

Through her story, my desire to further explore humanistic psychology grew. Humanistic psychology centers on the belief that humans are innately good. For example, good intentions are one of the driving forces of good behavior. When people experience something bad in their life, it promotes deviation from the natural tendency of being good (Felder, Aten, Neudeck, Shiomi-Chen, & Robbins, 2014). Jill is a 28-year-old Puerto Rican American woman.

She explained from her story that she was always very kind to others and wanted people to like her, feeling bad if anyone thought she was mean. When I spoke to her and she discussed her childhood, she seemed like an inherently compassionate and gentle person. However, certain events in her life altered her perception of herself and the world. She has experienced prejudice from people here in the United States.

People sometimes have mistaken her for an illegal immigrant and even would not accept her identification as proof of her citizenship because she was born in Puerto Rico. She has had to endure racial slurs and a sense of not belonging even with people in a similar situation as her. These negative experiences have rendered her angry and afraid of the world.

If one recalls the way a villain in a movie becomes a villain, one can see that perhaps when at one point in their lives, they were kind and gentle, wanting to harm no one. However, certain events led to their disillusionment with the world and thus they took on a path to chaos and evil. Jill’s story is one of many that experience that morality shift, that apathy that I want to help.

I want to help understand why someone becomes corrupted by the influences of the world. That if hardship and suffering alter someone from a seemingly good personality to one that is darker, perhaps if these negative influences are removed, the person can gain back some of the inherent ‘goodness’.  When I decided to become a doctoral student, I knew that I was going to question what kind of person, what kind of professional I wanted to become. I was not sure I had made the right decision.

Perhaps I may have taken a misstep? But then, I spoke with Jill, and I had an epiphany. I realized I want to help people. I want to understand the human mind. Some may see the human mind in a pessimistic way, imagining that people can be monsters and not really change. However, I refuse to believe that. There is a natural goodness in people that can come back even after experiencing extreme trauma. It just takes work.

So, I talked with Jill and I explained to her why some people may see her in a way that was negative. I showed her that many do not feel the same way and that there is a chance she could find a place to belong. Although it required a lot of effort on her part, she began to let go of some of the fear she had of people and started to look on the bright side. She realized life wasn’t as negative as she thought.

  Assignment 2 Humanistic psychology has influenced both American culture and psychology over the span of several decades through informing women’s rights movements and civil rights debate. That is why the leaders of humanistic psychology convened in a 2000 conference to re-energize the field because of the interest to branch out to new exciting practice arenas. While there was excitement in these efforts, one of the reasons why there was a marginalization of the field was because of humanistic psychology’s rejection of quantitative research.

Instead the choice of qualitative methods led to problems with reputation within the field. The tenets discussed involve:  1. respect and empathy 2. development and clarification of values 3. Strengthening relational bonds 4. Development of a greater sense of choice and personal freedom being respectful of other’s needs and rights 5. Personal life goals and meaning 6. And promotion of a mutual care environment (Kriz & Längle, 2012) These tenets demonstrated the humanistic psychologists needed to explore what they could be capable of regarding the care and betterment of others.

The fundamental principles of humanism are as follows: * Humans seek to generate meaning in life and have intentional goals * People know of their existence; Humans are aware of their surroundings and themselves. * They realize past experiences have an impact on informing their current and future behavior (House, Kalisch, & Maidman, 2017). When people are aware of this, they can have the potential to change and realize what influences and experiences led to where they are now. People often attribute environment or genes or choices to how people are.

However, it is more complicated than that. Humanistic psychology empowers the individual to realize this and decide how and when they will change and what may have caused them to change. Assignment 3 The 1964 first invitational conference that included the bright minds of Maslow, May, Murphy, Murray, Rogers, and others did more for humanistic psychology than anticipated. That is because they questioned why the main and dominant versions of psychology could not deal with the various complexities of being human and the real problems that plague human life (McDonald & Wearing, 2013).

Therefore, the narrow academic discipline had to expand and offer a more empathetic view as well as a fuller experience and concept of being human. This is when human psychology as a term shifted into general use. Human psychology harkened back to the values expressed by the Greeks and the Hebrews to attempt to understand study qualities that make human life unique like self-consciousness, love, lust for power, self-determination, art, literature, and religion.  Maslow for example, developed a hierarchical theory of human motivation that asserts if certain basic needs.